Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Novel use of Redmine issue tracking software as a clinical tracking system for interventional radiology

2016; Elsevier BV; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.jvir.2015.12.717

1535-7732

Nathaniel Swinburne, Bradley N. Delman, A. Fischman, N. Tabori, F. Nowakowski, Rahul Patel, E. Kim, R. Lookstein, L. Gerke,

Radiation Dose and Imaging

Participants will understand how tools designed for other industries may be adapted for use by an interventional radiology practice. The ability to track procedures for educational, research and quality assurance purposes is crucial for an academic IR practice. For example, a patient undergoing locoregional therapy for HCC may be followed by multiple users for post-procedure adverse events and long-term clinical and imaging response. Various solutions exist for these purposes, including paper logbooks, local digital spreadsheet files, and cloud-based files, each having limitations in convenience and data security. An ideal solution would offer PACS integration to enable efficient collaboration by multiple users while maintaining HIPAA compliance. Proprietary PACS software add-on applications may meet these requirements but can be cost-prohibitive. We hypothesized that Redmine (http://redmine.org), a widely used free, open-source issue tracking application primarily used for software development, could be successfully adapted to facilitate tracking of IR procedures and associated clinical data. In 2014, we installed Redmine on a server running behind our department's firewall, ensuring data security and HIPAA compliance. Small modifications to the Redmine source code and GE Centricity files enable bidirectional communication between PACS and Redmine. The radiologist user runs the web-based client within a browser alongside PACS and creates a record in Redmine for a given study. With the installation of an existing Redmine plugin, key images may be attached from PACS. A user may be assigned to an action item, indicating responsibility for seeing it to completion. Multiple users may be added as "watchers," receiving auto-generated emails when a case is updated by another user (e.g., with clinical outcomes or imaging response). Existing records are viewed in a searchable database. Since launching, over 900 IR and diagnostic studies have been tracked in Redmine, enabling collaboration among 45 users. Redmine presents a useful, free option for tracking procedures within an academic IR practice, enriching education and facilitating research and QA initiatives.