Improving Digital Record Annotation Capabilities with Open-sourced Ontologies and Crowd-sourced Workers

The Museum of the City of New York has undertaken a long-term project to digitize its collection of 1.5 million objects, annotate them with metadata, and make them publicly available via the Internet. At present, Museum staff annotate images using a traditional lexicon assembled from authority sources such as the Library of Congress and the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus, but with limited resources the Museum cannot scale to meet its goal of providing the highest levels of accessibility and discoverability of collections to researchers as well as to the general public. This project offers a cost-effective, scalable solution that 1) consolidates the current lexicon with linked open data sources by generating alignments and reconciling semantically equivalent elements, creating a super-set lexicon, and 2) divides the work of annotating into micro-tasks that can be completed by huge labor pools available through crowd-sourced marketplaces

Effect of team training on improving MRI study completion rates and no-show rates

PurposeMagnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a high-cost imaging modality, and an optimized encounter ideally provides high-quality care, patient satisfaction, and capacity utilization. Our purpose was to assess the effectiveness of team training and its impact on patient show-up and completion rates for their MRI examinations.Materials and methodsA total of 97,712 patient visits from three tertiary academic medical centers over 1-year intervals were evaluated, totaling 49,733 visits at baseline and 47,979 after training. Each center's MRI team received team training skill training including advanced communication and team training techniques training. This training included onsite instruction including case simulation with scenarios requiring appropriate behavioral and communicative interventions. Orientation and training also utilized customized online tools and proctoring. The study completion rate and patient show-up rate during consecutive year-long intervals before and after team training were compared to assess its effectiveness. Two-sided chi-square tests for proportions using were applied at a 0.05 significance level.ResultsDespite differing no-show rates (5-22.2%) and study incompletion rates (0.7-3.7%) at the three academic centers, the combined patients' data showed significant (P < 0.0001) improvement in the patients' no-show rates (combined decreases from 11.2% to 8.7%) and incompletion rates (combined decreases from 2.3% to 1.4%).ConclusionOur preliminary results suggest training of the imaging team can improve the no-show and incompletion rates of the MRI service, positively affecting throughput and utilization. Team training can be readily implemented and may help address the needs of the current cost-conscious and consumer-sensitive healthcare environment. J. MAGN. RESON. IMAGING 2016;44:1040-1047