Digitcom Technologies Limited

From Requisition to Report: How AuthHMS 5.0 Closes the Loop on Radiology
Imaging doesn't fail at the scanner. It fails in the gaps around it.

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Ask any hospital administrator where radiology goes wrong, and almost nobody will point at the equipment. The CT scanner works. The radiographer is competent. The radiologist knows what they're looking at.

What breaks is everything *between* those things.

A doctor scribbles "CXR ?pneumonia" on a slip. The slip goes to the imaging desk — or it doesn't, because it stayed in a coat pocket until the end of the shift. The scan gets done. The images sit on a workstation waiting for a radiologist who doesn't know they're waiting. A report gets typed into a Word document and printed. The printout goes into a paper file. The doctor who ordered it has gone off shift, and the covering doctor never learns the result exists.

Meanwhile the patient sits at home, waiting for a phone call that nobody has been assigned to make.

None of that is a technology problem in the imaging sense. It's a **chain-of-custody problem**. And it's exactly the problem AuthHMS 5.0's radiology module was built to solve.

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# # Every scan starts as a real clinical question

In AuthHMS 5.0, an imaging order cannot exist in a vacuum. It is created against a specific **patient** and a specific **visit** — the actual clinical encounter that prompted it. If that visit has already been closed, the system refuses the order outright rather than quietly attaching a scan to a finished episode of care.

That single rule eliminates an entire category of orphaned requisitions: the scan nobody can trace back to a reason, the result that arrives attached to no encounter, the charge that appears on a bill with no clinical justification behind it.

Each order carries:

- **The modality** — which imaging service is being requested, drawn from a catalogue the hospital defines itself
- **The urgency** — `routine`, `urgent`, or `stat`, so the imaging department can triage a worklist instead of working through it in arrival order
- **The clinical indication** — up to a thousand characters explaining *why*, so the radiologist is reading the film with the clinical question in front of them rather than guessing at it
- **The ordering clinician** — recorded automatically from the logged-in user, not typed in and not optional

That last point matters more than it sounds. When a report raises a question, the person who asked for the scan is a database field, not a matter of handwriting analysis.

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# # Urgency that means something

A worklist where everything is equally important is a worklist where nothing is. AuthHMS 5.0 makes urgency a structured, required field on every imaging order — one of three explicit values, chosen at the moment of ordering by the clinician who knows the clinical picture.

A `stat` request for a suspected intracranial bleed does not queue behind forty routine follow-up films because it happened to be entered later. The distinction is in the data, which means it can drive the worklist, the reporting, and — when a department wants to know whether it is actually meeting its turnaround commitments — the audit.

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# # Reports that are structured, not just typed

A radiology report is not free text. It has a shape, and AuthHMS 5.0 enforces that shape.

Every report requires two distinct fields:

**Findings** — what is observed. The description of the image itself.

**Impression** — what it means. The radiologist's interpretation and conclusion.

These are stored separately because they are different things, and conflating them is how clinical meaning gets lost. A busy clinician scanning a patient's record needs the impression immediately; a specialist reviewing the case later needs the findings in full. Splitting them means both are available without either being buried in the other.

Each report is bound to the radiologist who authored it and to the order it answers. An optional image reference can carry the link to the stored study. And the moment a report is filed, the underlying order flips automatically from `pending` to `completed` — not because someone remembered to update a status, but because filing the report *is* the completion event.

**Orders cannot rot.** There is no state in which a scan has been reported but the order still shows as outstanding, and no state in which an order is marked complete with no report behind it. The two move together by design.

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# # The patient finds out — automatically

Here is the part that most systems leave to human diligence, and that human diligence reliably fails.

When a radiologist files a report in AuthHMS 5.0, the system immediately looks up the patient's contact details and sends a results-ready notification — by email if an address is on file, by SMS if only a phone number is. No queue for someone to work through. No end-of-day task that gets skipped when the department is short-staffed. No patient left wondering.

The notification tells the patient their results are ready and directs them to the patient portal or to contact the hospital. It deliberately carries no clinical content — a diagnosis should not arrive as a text message read alone on a bus.

And it is engineered to fail safely. If the messaging service is down, the notification attempt is caught and logged, but the report is still filed and the order still completes. A patient not receiving a text is a problem. A radiologist's report failing to save because a text message didn't send would be a much bigger one.

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# # Walls between hospitals, walls between roles

AuthHMS 5.0 runs multiple hospitals from a single installation, and radiology data is partitioned accordingly. Every modality, order, and report is scoped to its hospital, and every query is filtered by that scope — not as a convention developers are asked to remember, but as middleware every route in the module passes through.

Within a hospital, access is narrowed again by role:

- **Hospital Administrators** define the imaging catalogue and what each service costs
- **Clinical staff** raise orders and file reports
- **Cashiers and laboratory technicians cannot see radiology records at all**

That last restriction is deliberate and slightly unusual. Many systems gate *writing* clinical data carefully and then leave *reading* it wide open to anyone with a login. AuthHMS 5.0 gates reads to the same standard as writes, on the straightforward principle that a cashier processing a payment has no clinical need to browse a patient's imaging history — and that unnecessary visibility is itself a risk.

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# # Everything is recorded

Radiology activity flows into the same audit trail as the rest of the platform. Who ordered what, for which patient, on which visit, with what urgency, and who reported it — all captured with timestamps, all queryable.

When a hospital needs to answer *"why was this scan performed?"* — whether for a clinical review, a billing query, an insurance audit, or a complaint — the answer is a record, not a reconstruction from memory.

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# # What this actually buys a hospital

Strip away the technical detail and the radiology module delivers four things:

**No lost requisitions.** An order exists in the system from the moment it's raised, attached to a patient and a visit, visible to the imaging department immediately.

**No unreported studies.** Order status is driven by the report itself, so the gap between "scanned" and "reported" is always visible rather than assumed closed.

**No silent results.** The patient is notified the moment their report is filed, automatically, every time.

**No unanswerable questions.** Ordering clinician, indication, urgency, radiologist, findings, impression — all structured, all attributable, all auditable.

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# # The honest part

AuthHMS 5.0's radiology module is not a PACS. It does not store, render, or manipulate DICOM images, and it is not trying to. It manages the *clinical and administrative workflow* around imaging — the ordering, the tracking, the reporting, the notification, the audit — and holds a reference to wherever the images themselves live.

For most hospitals, that is precisely the gap. The imaging equipment usually works. The viewing software usually works. What's missing is the connective tissue that makes sure a scan requested on Monday morning is reported, communicated, billed, and traceable by Monday afternoon — and that nobody had to remember to make any of that happen.

That connective tissue is what AuthHMS 5.0 provides.

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*AuthHMS 5.0 is a multi-tenant hospital management platform covering patient records, clinical encounters, pharmacy, laboratory, radiology, wards, surgery, inventory, blood bank, insurance claims, and finance — with role-based access control and full audit logging across every module.*

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