Trainee Report Dashboard: Tool for Enhancing Feedback to Radiology Trainees about Their Reports

During their radiology residency, trainees must learn multiple facets of radiology practice, including the writing of radiology reports. An important factor in the trainee's development of reporting skills is feedback from the attending radiologist on the trainee's preliminary reports. The quality and quantity of feedback may vary and are not typically documented. As radiology department workloads have increased and stricter limitations have been imposed on trainee work hours, less time is available for attending radiologists and trainees to perform a joint retrospective review of radiology reports. To compensate, the authors have developed a Web-based dashboard that provides trainees with case-specific feedback about their reports. Components include an attending radiologist-trainee report discrepancy logging and communication system that is integrated with the institutional picture archiving and communication system, an automated preliminary report-final report comparator, modules showing statistics related to the discrepancy logger and report comparator components, and a Web page that unifies these components with image and report display capabilities. Both the actual report feedback and the trainee's use of the system are documented, and the resultant data may be used for evaluating trainee competence in written communication, as mandated by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. With these tools, trainees can obtain near-real-time feedback, which may pinpoint issues that can be corrected to improve the quality of their radiology reporting. This system, although it does not supplant face-to-face training sessions with attending radiologists, can augment traditional methods of learning.