Integrated care concepts and multidisciplinary process chains in aradiological context

Abstract

Modern patient-centered and cost-efficient care concepts in hospitals require the mapping of multidisciplinary process chains into clinical pathways. Clinical decision support systems and operations research methods use algorithms to classify patients into homogeneous groups and to model acomplete clinical pathway for scheduling individual procedures. An improvement of the economic situation of the care facility can be achieved through improved resource utilization, reduced patient waiting times and ashortening of the length of stay. The interdisciplinary use of centrally stored interoperable information and comprehensive care management via information technology (IT) services lay the foundation for the dissolution of traditional IT system architectures in medicine and the development of flexibly integrable modern system platforms. New IT approaches such as the semantically standardized definition of procedures and resource properties, the use of clinical decision support systems and the use of service-oriented system architectures form the basis for the deep integration of radiology services into comprehensive interdisciplinary care concepts.