Keywords: Workflow applications

Keywords are descriptive tags that you can add to a study. Later, you can search for the study using these keywords.

Keywords are another way for a site to create custom workflows. These custom workflows start with a user tagging studies with a keyword, such as "Poor exposure." The PACS Administrator can create a worklist based around this keyword. For example, you can create a worklist for all studies that are tagged with the keyword "Poor exposure" so that the department can review quality control issues.

If you have the correct keyword operations assigned to your permissions, you can create keywords for your personal use or create keywords available to all IMPAX users.

Example workflows driven by keywords

The following examples show how keywords can be used to drive a specific workflow.

Image quality assurance

To track the quality of the images acquired in your department, define keywords for radiologists and clinicians to apply to studies that have poor quality images. Then, create a worklist that searches on these keywords to track the number of studies where the images were poor.

ER discrepancies

When ER physicians enter study comments for a preliminary diagnosis, or wet read, the radiologist may disagree with this preliminary diagnosis. To ensure that the ER physician knows when a diagnosis differs, radiologists can apply an "ER discrepancy" keyword to the study. Then, the PACS Administrator can define a worklist for the ER stations which searches on this keyword. For details, refer to Configuring IMPAX for the ER.

Cases to follow-up

If a radiologist wants to follow-up on a case in a few weeks, for example, after a biopsy has been performed, he or she can define a keyword for this activity and then either search for the studies using this keyword, or define a worklist based on this keyword.