Medical Imaging Decision And Support

Rationale: Diagnostic medical imaging is essential in health care and guides patient management decisions. Rapid advances in imaging technology have enabled diagnosis at an early disease stage. Nevertheless, striving for early diagnosis leads to substantial overuse of diagnostic tests (too many tests are performed) and overdiagnosis (diagnosed abnormalities that are unlikely to affect a patient's health or well-being), with dire consequences to patient outcomes and health care costs. Computerized decision support systems (CDSS), such as the European Society of Radiology (ESR) iGuide, have been developed to guide referring physicians at the point of care. Objective: The overall objective of this project is to promote the appropriate, meaningful, value-based and personalized use of medical imaging. The specific objectives of this study are to evaluate the trends over time with implementation of a CDSS to guide imaging referrals (ESR iGuide) in key outcomes related to the appropriate use of diagnostic imaging tests, and to compare these trends between departments randomized between implementation of the active intervention (with decision support) and the control condition (no decision support). Study design: The study will be performed as a multi-center cluster randomized trial with departments acting as clusters combined with a before-after-revert design. Four hospitals with each 8 participating departments for a total of 32 clusters will be included in the study. All departments will start with the control condition. Subsequently, stratified per specialty (surgical vs non-surgical), half of the departments - chosen at random - will switch to the active intervention while the other half in the control condition. Study population: The study population consists of patients of eligible participating departments for whom a diagnostic imaging procedure is considered, and for whom a diagnostic imaging request is entered in a computerized order entry in such a form that it i