Amirsys’ STATdx® diagnostic support portal + Google Search Appliance = better medical decision-making

Posted by Roth LaFleur, Product Manager for Amirsys

Editors note: Today’s guest blogger is Roth LaFleur, Product Manager for Amirsys, a company specializing in delivering useful, timely medical information to physicians and other healthcare providers.

We have 40,000 users in 50 countries—top physicians, surgeons, and residents for STATdx—our imaging point-of-care, diagnostic clinical decision support portal. As you can imagine, time is a important to them and affects both the cost and quality of patient care. For busy radiologists, time spent performing diagnoses is tracked and billed on a per-minute basis and can be a critical factor in delivering care. This makes fast, relevant search a key element of STATdx. Working with Search Technologies, we integrated the Google Search Appliance (GSA) into the STATdx diagnostic support portal.

We were expending a high degree of effort to support the search capability in our STATdx portal. Even with a full-time employee dedicated to the effort, the relevance of search results continued to be unsatisfactory. The existing system lacked the ability to “learn” based on user interactions. Features such as spell correction, a “did you mean” function to recommend different terms, and translation of search terms needed to be accomplished through programming and constant tuning.

After a comparison of several service providers, we engaged Search Technologies Corporation to help us implement the Google Search Appliance. Search Technologies partnered with our team to identify the unique search needs and find an optimal approach to provide fast, relevant search for the STATdx decision support portal quickly and cost-effectively.

The Amirsys development team integrated the Search Appliance into STATdx, where now search is a central feature, accessible in every part of the user interface. Capabilities from Google such as automatic query completion greatly enhance decision-making due to improved usability, relevance, and speed. Before implementing the GSA, average response time for searches was five to seven seconds, with some very general searches taking up to 15 seconds. After integration of the GSA into STATdx, query time has been reduced to milliseconds, saving valuable time for Amirsys clients and the healthcare professionals and patients who rely on their diagnoses.

For us, integration of the Search Appliance into STATdx has enabled us to provide better, faster services and reduced costs by eliminating the need for someone dedicated full-time to the task of special programming and tuning. And for the radiologists who use the STATdx system, we are helping them by increasing speed, accuracy, and diagnostic confidence in complex cases—and most importantly elevating the quality of care.