A maximum of three prior studies unless otherwise agreed.

by Mark
(Australia)

We have made it policy to import a maximum of three prior studies unless otherwise agreed. we were getting in the situation where a dr would bring multiple cd's for import without knowing exactly what was on them - some would contain studies from years ago that were not relevant to the current treatment hence policy above.

Our workflow is to fix the imported images against the patient to a range of RIS exam codes that have been set up that have no billing attached. We proceed each of the codes with a "Z" just as an exercise to exclude these studies in any activity reporting.ie ZFIMR -MRI Foriegn images, ZFICT -CT Foreign Images etc. The studies are then manually set to approved in PACS so they do not get reported by our rads.