Manual Editing of MWL data

It is a very bad and dangerous idea to let users (radiographers/technicians) edit the data received through Modality Worklist.

Here is a scenario

There are 2 patients scheduled:

  • Joe Bloggs
  • ID = 12345
  • Study UID = 1.2.3.4.12345
  • John Doe
  • ID = 778899
  • Study UID = 1.2.3.4.778899

Now Joe Bloggs comes into the room, but the technician accidentally clicks on John Doe - what happens next? Of course, the technicians should force a re-query, and then re-select Joe Bloggs from the list, but if the modality allows edits, then most of the time the technicians will not do that, they will instead edit what they see on screen to match the patient they have, and will end up with this faulty data:

  • Joe Bloggs
  • ID = 12345
  • Study UID = 1.2.3.4.778899 <–Wrong Study UID as it is not edited

So, no-one notices anything wrong, and the images get generated with the study UID of 1.2.3.4.778899, but then John Doe comes in, and another study gets generated with study UID of 1.2.3.4.778899. At best, the PACS will spot the different patient ID,and throw an error - at worst it may simply file all the images under the patient ID first seen for that Study UID - 12345 = Joe Bloggs!

This is not a theoretical possibility - we have seen it happen many times. So, our recommendation is either:

  • Do not allow any editing of MWL received data, or
  • If the visible (UI) data is edited, then any non-visible data (particularly study UID) must be discarded, and the whole study treated as if the MWL data had not been available. This would of course require a locally generated Study UID