Investigation of misfiled cases in the PACS environment and a solution to prevent filing errors for chest radiographs.
OBJECTIVE
The aim of the study was to survey misfiled cases in a picture archiving and communication system environment at two hospitals and to demonstrate the potential usefulness of an automated patient recognition method for posteroanterior chest radiographs based on a template-matching technique designed to prevent filing errors.


METHODS
We surveyed misfiled cases obtained from different modalities in one hospital for 25 months, and misfiled cases of chest radiographs in another hospital for 17 months. For investigating the usefulness of an automated patient recognition and identification method for chest radiographs, a prospective study has been completed in clinical settings at the latter hospital.


RESULTS
The total numbers of misfiled cases for different modalities in one hospital and for chest radiographs in another hospital were 327 and 22, respectively. The misfiled cases in the two hospitals were mainly the result of human errors (eg, incorrect manual entries of patient information, incorrect usage of identification cards in which an identification card for the previous patient was used for the next patient's image acquisition). The prospective study indicated the usefulness of the computerized method for discovering misfiled cases with a high performance (ie, an 86.4% correct warning rate for different patients and 1.5% incorrect warning rate for the same patients).


CONCLUSIONS
We confirmed the occurrence of misfiled cases in the two hospitals. The automated patient recognition and identification method for chest radiographs would be useful in preventing wrong images from being stored in the picture archiving and communication system environment.
Morishita
Junji
J
Department of Health Sciences, School of Medicine, Kyushu University, 3-1-1 Maidashi, Higashi-ku, Fukuoka 812-8582, Japan. jm@shs.kyushu-u.ac.jp
Watanabe
Hideyuki
H
Katsuragawa
Shigehiko
S
Oda
Nobuhiro
N
Sukenobu
Yoshiharu
Y
Okazaki
Hiroko
H
Nakata
Hajime
H
Doi
Kunio
K
D003628:Database Management Systems; D005371:Filing; D005568:Forms and Records Control; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods; D011446:Prospective Studies; D013902:Radiography, Thoracic; D011873:Radiology Information Systems / Q000458:organization & administration*