Dr. Baccei Awarded Carl Akins Risk Management Grant to Reduce Costs and Increase Safety

Dr. Steve Baccei has been awarded the Carl Akins Risk Management Grant from the Risk Management Department at UMass Memorial Medical Center.  This grant is awarded to “UMMHS employees, programs, and affiliates with a goal of reducing costs and increasing patient and employee safety through projects that address either patient/visitor exposures as related to professional or general liability insurance, or employee exposures as related to worker’s compensation or long-term disability.”

Recently, the Department of Radiology purchased and implemented PeerVue, a software program that provides real time monitoring of a variety of quality metrics including critical results communication and documentation.  Dr. Baccei, the newly appointed Vice Chair for Radiology, Quality, Patient Safety and Process Improvement, says that his project “Improving Communication of Critical Results on Radiology Imaging Studies and Procedures Using PeerVue Software” will allow the use of this new data to further improve and monitor the delivery of critical results to clinicians, and ultimately improve patient safety, while reducing institutional risk. 

This risk management project looks to improve communication of actionable findings on diagnostic radiology imaging studies between radiologists and clinical providers and reduce medical legal risk to the Department of Radiology (and ultimately UMass Memorial Health Care).  The grant funding will provide monetary assistance for data analysis, IT resources, and other technical resources.   

Expected outcomes for this project will be most attractive to clinical providers who order radiology studies, as well as clinical radiologists, radiology support staff, risk management, and patients who have radiology imaging and procedures.  These outcomes include:

• Determine the percentage of radiology studies with an actionable finding;
  
  
• Increase documented reports with actionable findings through the use of the PeerVue program;
  
  
• Achieve >95% compliance,  >90% utilization of the PeerVue for recording actionable findings, and  >90% accuracy for correctly labeling category of actionable finding(s) in PeerVue program;
  
  
• Increase radiologist understanding of the importance of properly communicating critical results while providing them the framework to do so;
  
  
• Provide Radiologists and support staff training on how to properly and effectively use the PeerVue software program for critical results communication.
  
  

The Carl Akins Risk Management Grant will ultimately help Radiologists at UMass deliver the highest level of patient care through proper and timely communication of critical results to the clinicians who care for our patients.