Synoptic Reporting for Pathology
PALGA is the national pathology foundation of the Netherlands. It is empowered by the Dutch national health system to provide a mandatory synoptic reporting application that is used by all pathologists in the country working out of 56 regional pathology labs. The LogicNets application uses PALGA-modeled decisioning to enable pathologists to most efficiently capture critical reporting information and ensuring accurate and complete report submissions. The result of deploying LOGICNETS has not only led to high user satisfaction ratings from the pathologists and an increase in the quality of the reporting, but has greatly improved the ability of the foundation to enable pathology research.
A new article in the May 2019 Journal of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) shows clear evidence of improved patient outcomes and survival as a direct result of using Standardized Structured Reporting (SSR) (AKA “Synoptic Reporting”). The research looked at over 70 thousand colorectal cancer cases in the Netherlands of which one third had been processed using SSR. All SSR in the Netherlands is implemented through nationwide use of the LogicNets platform by our customer PALGA. The study traced SSR-supported cases along with reference and the use of alternative “narrative reporting” processes to corresponding patient outcome records in the two largest Dutch registries — the NKR (Dutch Cancer Registration) and the DRCA (Dutch ColoRectal Audit).
The study credits the measurable increase in completeness and accuracy of SSR-acquired patient data to significant improvements in the administration of adjuvant therapy and survival rates for those patients. Read the article here.