Actionable reporting.

Ultimately, any business is only as strong as the weakest link in its operational chain. This series has used the concept of the imaging value chain to identify sources of potential weakness and error within the imaging enterprise and then offered practical solutions for remedying those weaknesses to optimize patient care. In this column,we address the endproduct of all radiologic services, the imaging report. All radiology operations should be geared toward the delivery of a timely, actionable report. Radiologists are first and foremost in the information business [1] and must therefore devise their operations and workflow toward the ultimate goal of producing text data that confer as precisely as possible the unique information inherent within the image data set in conjunction with other relevant biomarker and clinical data available in hospital databases. The report should be optimized to address the unique clinical questionbeing askedby referrers.The value of any report relates to how helpful its information is in adjusting a patient’s care and, hence, that patient’s outcome. In other words, image data become pivotal information through a timely, actionable report. As previously discussed in this series, an actionable report is the result of meeting the goals of the ACR’s Imaging 3.0 initiative (imaging appropriateness, quality, safety, efficiency, and patient experience). Otherwise, the report may become inactionable well before the radiologist starts to interpret the images, such as when an inappropriate imaging study is performed or the wrong protocol is administered. Nor is a report fully actionable when modality operations are inefficient, with delays to patient access and consequently diagnosis, aside from undermining the patient experience. In short, a report can be