Implementation of a closed-loop reporting system for critical values and clinical communication in compliance with goals of the joint commission.

Background: Current practices of reporting critical laboratory values make it challenging to measure and assess the timeliness of receipt by the treating physician as required by The Joint Commission's 2008 National Patient Safety Goals.

Methods: A multidisciplinary team of laboratorians, clinicians, and information technology experts developed an electronic ALERTS system that reports critical values via the laboratory and hospital information systems to alphanumeric pagers of clinicians and ensures failsafe notification, instant documentation, automatic tracking, escalation, and reporting of critical value alerts. A method for automated acknowledgment of message receipt was incorporated into the system design.

Improving language models for radiology speech recognition.

Speech recognition systems have become increasingly popular as a means to produce radiology reports, for reasons both of efficiency and of cost. However, the suboptimal recognition accuracy of these systems can affect the productivity of the radiologists creating the text reports. We analyzed a database of over two million de-identified radiology reports to determine the strongest determinants of word frequency.