Breast centers are faced with the daunting challenge of balancing excellence in patient care, adhering to regulatory and accreditation requirements, and turning the profit needed to keep the doors open. Although monitoring statistics consistently may seem like one more chore on the list, staying on top of key metrics can help breast centers achieve all three.
But which breast center statistics are the most important to monitor on a regular basis?
We’re so glad you asked.
Key Breast Center Statistics to Regularly Monitor
To help your breast center meet patient care, regulatory, and business needs—you should track the following seven statistics on a consistent basis.
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Patient Callbacks:
When patients need follow-up of some type from breast imaging centers, it’s critical to ensure they receive it. The system that generates the report should provide automatic generation of callback lists to recall those patients who need immediate diagnostic follow-up or biopsy procedures—in addition to information about previous attempts to contact them.
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Daily Procedure Trends:
To determine what’s working and what’s not, breast centers must be able to gain insights into daily trends. This is particularly true regarding unread studies and incomplete reports—which could indicate a delay in reporting between the time the exam was performed and the time the images are read.
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Status of Patient Reports and Patient Letters:
If patient reports are not yet in a released or completed status, breast centers need to know about it. Being able to determine the status of patient letters is also essential. Both metrics are critical to quality care and compliance reporting.
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Pathology Request Status:
When a patient has a BI-RADS 4 or 5 finding, or when a biopsy-type procedure is performed that has been configured to request a pathology, a pathology request form should be generated. Tracking whether those requests have been completed is essential—both in terms of outcome tracking and meeting MQSA compliance requirements to ensure that pathology is being correlated as needed.
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Productivity Tracking:
Understanding the workloads of radiologists can help breast centers provide more effective support so doctors can better meet patient care needs.
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Outcome Tracking:
Breast centers must have a way to generate reporting for outcome tracking and other measures to maintain MQSA compliance.
Additionally, breast centers seeking to benchmark their performance and/or obtain specific certifications must track and report required measures. A breast imaging reporting system that can gather the correct information in the correct reporting format is critical to submitting information quickly and easily to achieve accreditation and maintain compliance.
How MagView Supports Breast Center Tracking Needs with Clarity Reports
While tracking all of those statistics on a regular basis may sound overwhelming, the good news is that MagView users have the power to easily track key statistics through our Clarity Reports.
Clarity Reports is a comprehensive suite of data reports, providing complete and efficient insight into your breast imaging program—and can even be configured for auto-generation according to your unique needs.
Check out how each of the statistics on the list can be tracked through Clarity Reports to help you stay on top of the essential information you need.
Patient Callbacks
MagView recommends that patient callbacks be tracked on a daily basis—which can be accomplished by running the Follow-up Report. There are two ways to generate this information:
- The Follow-up Tracking Module is an in-application version of the Follow-Up Report.
- For those who don’t have this tool, the Follow-up Report is the preferred method for generating these lists. Limited to open follow-up records, this report displays patient contact information and detailed follow-up events to show previous attempts to recall patients.
Daily Procedure Trends
MagView also recommends that daily procedure trends be tracked on a daily basis—which can be accomplished by running the Daily Log Report.
This report can help sites identify trends in the previous day’s procedures, such as discovering any unread studies. Users can also configure this report to generate a batch of pre-populated history forms if the studies are already in MagView.
It may not be necessary for very low-volume facilities to run this report daily. However, for middle- to high-volume breast centers, remaining updated on daily procedure trends is essential for optimizing patient flow.
Status of Patient Reports and Patient Letters
MagView recommends that the status of patient reports and patient letters be tracked on a weekly basis. Both of these stats can be accessed using the Incomplete Reports tool, which is comprised of two sub-reports:
- Reports Not Released—which shows exams that are not yet in a released or completed status. As noted previously, this could indicate a delay in reporting between the time the exam was performed and when the images are read.
- Patient Letters Not Released—which shows any study records where a patient letter has not yet been generated. This could represent incomplete studies or issues with generating the lay letter.
Pathology Request Status
MagView recommends tracking the status of pathology requests on a weekly basis—which can be accomplished by running the Pathology Not Entered Report. This report highlights requests that have not yet been satisfied.
Productivity Tracking
MagView recommends tracking productivity on a monthly basis—which can be accomplished by running the Productivity Report. This report generates statistics related to each user’s level of activity within the MagView system. Full-reporting sites, where radiologists create all of their finding reports in MagView, can use this report to track numbers for their readers.
Follow-up Tracking
In addition to running the Follow-up Report daily, MagView recommends that breast centers also run this report every month or so for a much broader date range. In this way, breast centers can identify any open follow-up records that are older than the past week or month that are at risk of being missed in the regular follow-up workflow.
Outcome Tracking
The Quality Assurance Report provides the critical data needed for outcome tracking and other measures to maintain MQSA compliance. Such data includes Positive Predictive Values (PPV), Specificity, Sensitivity, Cancer Detection and Recall Rates, and other vital statistics.
Quality and Accreditation Reporting Statistics
MagView supports ACR Breast Imaging Center of Excellence measures, NQMBC quality measures, NAPBC accreditation measures, and more. We do that by providing the tools needed to easily gather and submit the information that’s required.
- NQMBC Reporting: MagView supports secure electronic submission of measures to the NCoBC. MagView will generate data for all measures regardless of the type of facility involved.
- NAPBC Reporting: Clarity Reports also contains a report for the National Accreditation Program for Breast Centers. Each of the relevant measures is reported on a summary, as well as sub-reports for each of the measures to view individual patient statistics.
If you’re a current customer and would like to learn more about the statistics you should be following on a regular basis and how MagView’s comprehensive reporting tools can help, please visit the MagView Help Center to view our online customer knowledge base.
You can also schedule a remote or on-site training session with a member of our talented training team for a customized review that is tailored to your site and workflow.
Not a MagView customer yet?
We’d love to talk with you about how MagView’s wide array of solutions can help your breast center achieve excellence in patient care; adherence to regulatory and accreditation requirements; and the financial success needed to keep doing what you do best.
