The coronavirus clearly has a huge impact on the workload of healthcare professionals. The burden that they are currently facing is unprecedented. We would like to assist Dutch Radiologists during this period with a newly designed Structured Radiology Template to report on suspicion of COVID-19. Moreover, by using this template, data can be collected for further research.
The NVVR (Dutch Society for Radiology) has added additional questions and a new clinical coding, CO-RADS, to the existing standardised report ‘CT Thorax’, to assist clinicians when reporting on diseases with a suspicion of COVID-19. In collaboration with the Nictiz (the Dutch organisation of reference for the digital exchange of information in healthcare), specialised medical SNOMED-CT codes have been developed linked to these CO-RADS codes. The objectives of using this standard report, according to the NVVR, are:
- Improve communication with referring physicians
- Compare data across institutions and populations
- Provide the foundations for gathering better scientific evidence.
As requested by various hospitals, such as the Martini Hospital in Groningen, we have developed a structured template based on the official NVVR guidelines for the reporting of suspected cases of COVID-19. When completing the “CT Thorax COVID-19” template, the correct SNOMED-CT codes are automatically linked to the answers provided by the clinician.
When these reports are created with the use of our templates, we can make the data, although anonymised, easily available for scientific analysis and population research. This is very valuable when research is of vital importance.