Safety analysis of clinical workflows: The case of the workflow within a radiology department

Radiology Information Systems (RIS) and Picture Archiving and Communication systems (PACS) are used widely to help in the workflow management in radiology departments. Effective safety analysis tools are needed to ensure the reliability of these high-risk workflows, because errors that may happen through routine workflow propagate within the workflow to result in harmful failures of the system´s output. This paper showed how to apply a software technology called Hierarchically-Performed Hazard Origin and Propagation Studies (HiP-HOPS) to analyse the safety of RIS/PACS workflows. The results comprised identification of the root causes of hazardous workflow failures that may put patient´s life at risk. We concluded that HiP-HOPS is applicable to this area of healthcare and is able to present benefits through the detailed information on possible failures both their causes and effects. Therefore, it has the potential to improve the safety of RIS/PACS workflows and other clinical workflows.