I-Corps: Integrating Patient Facial Photographs with Medical Imaging Studies

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According the Institute of Medicine's 1999 report "To Err is Human," it is estimated that nearly 100,000 people die every year in the United States due to medical errors. It is estimated that nationally the number of serious adverse events due to wrong-patient errors in Radiology, where one patient's medical imaging study is placed in another patient's folder, is about 10,000 per year. Such errors can result in serious harm to both involved patients. The Joint Commission has recognized this to be a serious problem and mandates that a dual-identifier technique be implemented whenever any medical service is provided. Despite this dual-identifier mandate, wrong-patient errors continue to occur in Radiology. The proposed innovation is a novel technology that automatically captures patient photographs simultaneously with every medical imaging study. This technology could lead to a powerful additive identification tool and help prevent mislabeling of imaging examinations, thereby resulting in fewer medical errors. In addition, digital photographs may lead to improvement in the diagnostic interpretation of medical imaging examinations without an adverse impact on interpretation time.The proposed technology is based on automatically and seamlessly obtaining point-of-care patient facial photographs along with each and every medical imaging study. These photographs will serve as unique, intrinsic, externally visible patient identifiers, which will be embedded within the medical imaging studies. When interpreting radiologists and physicians view the medical images, the photographs are also automatically displayed in a separate window in the picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) workstation. Thus, when a wrong-patient error occurs, even if the radiologist does not notice the difference between the current and prior radiographs, a comparison between the current and prior photographs can easily alert her to the wrong-patient error. The proposed technology has the added advantage that the patient photographs can provide the interpreting physicians with clinical information, which has hitherto not been available. Thus this technology may, in addition to providing intrinsic, externally-visible identifiers, improve interpreting physicians? accuracy and efficiency.