Single Center Retrospective Initiative to Improve Reporting Times of Echocardiograms

Timely completion and reporting of echocardiograms (echo) directly influence patient management decisions in pediatric cardiology. Tracking these measures is paramount to improving efficiency in pediatric echo laboratories. Previous efforts in pediatric and adult echo laboratories have demonstrated a significant improvement in the timely reporting of studies by replacing dictation with online electronic reporting systems, increasing awareness of delays among physicians, and implementing a cardiologist-led triage system for echo requests. We sought to evaluate the impact of a modified sonographer workflow initiative on the time to completion of echo reports at our center. A modification to the sonographer workflow was introduced at our echo laboratory, requiring sonographers to complete preliminary measurements immediately after image acquisition for each study, rather than the previous stacked workflow of completing measurements after image acquisition for 2-3 studies. With this intervention, the average time from first image acquisition to completion of preliminary reporting by sonographers reduced by 27% from 1 h (h) 39 min (m) to 1 h 12 m (p < 0.001), while the average time to completion of reports by attending cardiologists reduced by 15% from 4 h 49 m to 4 h 4 m (p < 0.001). We demonstrated a significant improvement in the timely completion of echo reports by switching from a stacked workflow to a linear, sequential model. This intervention led to a 27% reduction in sonographer reporting time and a 15% reduction in attending cardiologist report completion time.