Transition From Peer Review to Peer Learning: Lessons Learned.

Landmark publications, such as To Err is Human, confronted the healthcare community with the egregious toll medical errors played in both patient safety and overall healthcare costs. This heralded a paradigm shift and a call for action by professional organizations to enact methods to ensure physician competency and quality assurance. The American College of Radiology similarly convened a task force to discuss these concerns and how best to address quality assurance in radiology practice, leading to the development of RADPEER, a score-based peer review system.

Closing the Loop-A Pilot in Health System Improvement.

A significant number of patients are reported to not receive timely completion of their recommended follow-up intervention following the interpretation of their imaging studies, contributing to patient deaths resulting from inaccurate or delayed diagnosis. Though automated critical test notification systems and computerized communication mechanisms currently exist, many institutions are discovering that there continue to be gaps in the completion of follow-up recommendations. Herein, we describe how we developed and implemented a closed-loop program dedicated to identifying such gaps and ensuring patients were aware of and received appropriate follow-up.

ChemCom: A Software Program for Searching and Comparing Chemical Libraries.

An efficient chemical comparator, a computer application facilitating searching and comparing chemical libraries, is useful in drug discovery and other relevant areas. The need for an efficient and user-friendly chemical comparator prompted us to develop ChemCom (Chemical Comparator) based on Java Web Start (JavaWS) technology. ChemCom provides a user-friendly graphical interface to a number of fast algorithms including a novel algorithm termed UnionBit Tree Algorithm.