New Radiology Reporting System Decreased Time to Pancreatic Cancer Diagnoses

Radiologists are trained to use descriptive words to explain what they see in or on the pancreas on an abdominal scan. But a new Kaiser Permanente study shows that having radiologists use standardized terms and hashtags to describe what they see creates a clearer path for physician follow-up that can lead to earlier detection of pancreatic cancer.

“This study showed that our system that standardizes how suspicious findings on the pancreas are reported, and that alerts a clinician promptly to these findings, has increased the number of cancers we have detected earlier,” said lead author Eleanor L. Ormsby, MD, MPH, a diagnostic radiologist with The Permanente Medical Group. “This is clinically significant because a patient who has a pancreatic cancer detected early is more likely to survive longer than one whose cancer is detected late.” Read more . . .

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