ACR Assist Empowers Radiologists by Providing Clinical Decision Support

A new ACR Assist toolbox will provide radiologists with a collection of structured information to replace existing variable, unstructured narrative reporting.

ACR Assist is part of a suite of products intended to bring Imaging 3.0 principles into standard clinical practice. ACR Assist helps radiologists produce structured, actionable reports within their natural workflow and includes raw clinical content, an encoding scheme, and a communication framework for improved content delivery.

ACR Assist is provided by the ACR American College of Radiology (ACR; Reston, VA, USA). The tools are vendor neutral and provide point-of-interpretation access to taxonomies, classification and communication guidance, care pathways and algorithms to existing reporting systems.

The core clinical components of ACR Assist include computer-readable versions of the Lung Cancer Screening Reporting and Data System (Lung-RADSTM), Prostate Imaging Reporting and Data System (PI-RADSTM), Liver Imaging Reporting and Data System (LI-RADS), and other structured classification and reporting taxonomies.

Vendors of radiological reporting software can integrate clinical guidance objects from the ACR Assist toolset into their reporting process using Natural Language Processing (NLP). The tools then help determine when to provide the relevant content objects to the interpreting radiologist within a conventional reporting workflow.

The Imaging 3.0 Informatics Infrastructure consists of ACR Select clinical decision support, ACR Assist, ACR Common, a standardized core set of terminology still in development, and ACR Connect.

Epic Systems (Verona, Wisconsin, USA), Cerner (North Kansas City, MO, USA) and Nuance (Burlington, MA, USA) plan to demonstrate ACR Assist together with other value-based imaging tools at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA 2015) annual meeting.

“ACR Assist brings evidence-based guidelines for recommendations and actionable reporting into clinical practice, providing guidance during interpretation at the time this information is most useful to radiologists,” says Keith Dreyer, DO, PhD, FACR, chair of the American College of Radiology Commission on Informatics. “The technology was developed to meet practices’ changing needs while enhancing patient care quality by integrating key, structured data elements into variable, free-form narrative reports,” he added.

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