Patient Safety As Gold Standard in the Era of Big Data

Healthcare is undergoing a digital transformation and at Affidea we are committed to leading this pathway, improving quality of care and patient safety, while driving operational efficiencies. The cornerstone of ensuring this across our diverse geographies is to leverage a new technology built on GE Healthcare’s Applied Intelligence platform, Imaging Insights, which merges dose, technical and operational data from imaging machines. Better data integration and analysis is indeed key for driving our decisions in order to improve patient care.

Some of this vast amount of data is coming from the Affidea Dose Excellence programme, through which we analyse information from more than 75000 Computed Tomography (CT) scans each month.

This is a unique global programme for patient safety and radiation protection which brought Affidea international recognition. We are the most awarded healthcare provider for patient safety by the European Society of Radiology, where 50% of the total centres awarded with 5 stars for radiation protection on the Eurosafe Wall of Stars belong to the company.

As the leading European provider for advanced diagnostic imaging, outpatient and cancer care services, with 309 medical centres across 15 countries, we have always been a pioneer in our industry, looking for clinically proven methods to enhance clinical excellence and offer outstanding patient care.

With this in mind, we have taken our Dose Excellence programme to the next level with the launch of a 3.2 version of DoseWatch in combination with a real-time business intelligence (BI) tool- Imaging Insight- for data dashboarding. The BI is installed on Corporate Affidea Microsoft Azure Cloud and collects data, in a secure and compliant way, from all local DoseWatch installations, with Affidea Hungary and Spain centres being the first to implement it. Affidea thus becomes the first healthcare provider in Europe to install this innovative BI solution.

A Real Time BI Data Dashboard to Drive Operational Efficiency and Clinical Excellence Across the Group

The Imaging Insights Business Intelligence tool regularly updates and correlates multiple data sources into one consolidated view. It keeps the clinical teams well informed, allowing them to focus on optimising operational efficiencies, clinical excellence and patient experience.

Imaging Insights can help achieve operational efficiencies by optimising the exam duration and procedure scheduling to increase throughput and reduce backlog. At the same time, it also helps benchmarking CT technologies at group level, identifying variations in practices across multiple centres and staff performance for training opportunities.

This is another proof of our strong compliance with 2013/59 Euratom Directive by identifying variations in real time and by standardising and optimising protocols, while maintaining the optimal image quality and increase safety for our patients.

At the 107th RSNA Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting to be held in Chicago starting on November 28th Affidea will report on preliminary results obtained with the implementation of the Business Intelligence Tool, during the scientific presentation “Towards Big Data And Visualization Analytics: Dose Management 3.0 In A Multi-center European Settings”.

Moreover, a key feature of the new DoseWatch 3.2 version is the contrast media data management which allows notifications on clinical context and cumulative dose of iodine (risk factors, prior adverse events) as well as injection details (contrast media, volume, injection protocol). All these features will allow Affidea to manage contrast media data in order to strengthen the clinical protocols and track patient historical data in terms of radiation, iodine dose and contrast media adverse events, in this way offering enhanced standards of quality and safety in our premises. Thanks to the tracking and optimisation of contrast media, the company will be able to personalise contrast injection to each patient, avoiding any unnecessary extra contrast injection.

Ultimately, it’s all about patient safety. That’s why we are taking Dose Excellence to a level that no one in Europe has ever seen before, with a significant impact on radiation protection, clinical excellence and education. After Hungary and Spain, we aim at rolling it out across other Affidea countries during 2022. 

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