Method and system for detecting and identifying patients who did not obtain the relevant recommended diagnostic test or therapeutic intervention, based on processing information that is present within radiology reports or other electronic health records

摘要

Occasionally relevant findings and important recommendations made within medical or radiology reports fail to elicit the appropriate follow-up due to multiple factors. The clinician may miss the recommendation or lose track of it while addressing a more acute illness, the recommendation may have not been conveyed to the patient, or the patient may fail to schedule or show-up for the subsequent exam. Prior literature indicates that a significant percentage of scheduled appointments result in no-shows or cancellations by patients, and a small but significant percentage of indicated follow-up studies are thus not obtained. Such omissions occasionally result in adverse consequences suffered by the patients, and increase the risk of legal liabilities to the clinicians or radiologists. A method and system is presented that identifies patients who did not obtain such recommended diagnostic tests or therapeutic interventions, and which sorts and filters the detected patients according to relevance of the recommendation, optionally discarding recommendations of low relevance, and facilitates the management of the detected patients.