Receive a Study, Write the Report and Sign It

Who / when: the radiographer, who acquires the images at the scanner; and the radiologist, who reads them, writes the report, and signs it off. This is the fulfilment half of imaging — the order was placed on the scanner’s worklist in Send an Imaging Order to the Modality Worklist, and now the pictures come back, get read, and become a signed report the ordering physician can act on. Acquiring and reporting are deliberately two different people with two different roles: a radiographer captures, a radiologist interprets and owns the words.

We’ll follow Ngozi, a radiographer, and Dr. Adeyemi, the reporting radiologist.

1. Radiographer — acquire the images on the modality as normal. When you’re done, the scanner pushes the study up to Veona using DICOM C-STORE (the standard way a modality sends acquired images, where DICOM is Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine). Veona matches the study to its order by accession number — no manual linking.
2. Radiographer — confirm the study has landed on Imaging → Studies, the list of acquired DICOM studies. The order advances to an acquired state, ready for reporting; the images are now available to the radiologist in the viewer.
3. Radiologist — open Imaging → Report Authoring. The page is titled Radiology Report and shows the structured report for this study’s accession and patient. Press “Open Images” to view the DICOM images in the PACS Viewer (PACS = the picture archive the viewer reads from) without leaving the report. Apply a template from Imaging → Report Templates if you use one.
4. Radiologist — set the “Assessment Category” (Normal, Benign, Probably Benign, Suspicious, Highly Suspicious, or Critical), then write the “Findings” and the “Impression”. Both Findings and Impression are required before you can sign.
5. Radiologist — press “Sign & Finalise”. In the confirm dialog, enter your 6-digit eSign PIN (your electronic signature, separate from your password) and press “Sign Report”. Signing locks the report and releases it to the ordering clinician and the patient record.

Caution

If you set the assessment to Critical (or Highly Suspicious), the confirm dialog warns you that signing will raise a critical-result notification to the ordering clinician. Signing then creates a pending critical finding that must be telephoned and read back — don’t treat it as finished at signature. Carry it through Close the Loop on a Critical Imaging Finding.

Note

The ordering physician’s permissions never include report authoring, and the radiologist’s authoring screens never appear in a prescriber’s navigation. This is the order-versus-fulfil split: the physician orders and reads the released report; the radiologist writes and signs it. Nobody can do both halves of the same study.

What happens next

Once signed, the report is released to the ordering clinician — they read it from Imaging → Imaging Reports and from the patient’s chart, and the study images stay viewable in the PACS Viewer. The released report also becomes eligible for the patient portal, alongside any lab results — see Release Lab and Imaging Results to the Patient Portal. On the ordering side, both the lab and imaging halves of the original requisition now show together on the physician’s one converged view: See Every Order Converge on One Physician View.

Follow the trail

• Previous: Send an Imaging Order to the Modality Worklist
• Next: Release Lab and Imaging Results to the Patient Portal
• Related: Close the Loop on a Critical Imaging Finding
• Related: Send an Imaging Order to the Modality Worklist