Welcome

The Center for Evidence-Based Imaging (CEBI) was established at Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in the fall of 2002. Thanks to a partnership with EMC Corporation of Hopkinton, MA, the Center was provided with start-up funds and equipment. The Center's leadership includes Ramin Khorasani, MD as director and a scientific steering committee of seven other distinguished scientific leaders.

The Center is dedicated to improving the quality and efficiency of care delivery using innovative technology solutions, including knowledge delivery in real time and at the point of care to reduce medical errors, costs and to improve the quality of care for both patients and providers. It uses innovative data management, knowledge delivery and storage solutions to leverage the content of massive multi-disciplinary databases at Partners HealthCare System (a system formed from a partnership between Brigham and Women's and Massachusetts General Hospitals as well as many other community and specialty hospitals).

The Center is specifically designed to help physicians make the best possible decisions about when--and when not--to order diagnostic imaging tests. Recent data have shown that somewhere between 10% and 30% of all imaging studies ordered for patients were likely inappropriate. The ordering of those tests adds substantially to health care costs but it is also an indicator of probable misdiagnoses and possibly sub-optimal care delivery. Were an effective solution to be found for this issue, it would not only reduce the cost of medical care but would doubtless also reduce medical error and all the human and financial difficulties that ensue from such error.

By adopting innovative methods for data management, knowledge delivery, and data storage, the CEBI is able to leverage the content of massive multi-disciplinary databases at Partners HealthCare System and to then deliver that knowledge in real time thereby informing the decisions being made by individual physicians as they treat individual patients. The CEBI's large-scale data warehouse already stores more than 1,000,000 structured data entries, organized for access by physicians.

Our goal now is to provide physicians with an unprecedented ability to compare a single patient's symptoms with thousands of other patient histories, additional pertinent medical literature and best practice guidelines to help them select the most appropriate diagnostic imaging test for each individual case they treat.

The Center for Evidence-Based Imaging now brings together disparate databases to streamline the diagnostic imaging process. It makes available to physicians context-specific real-time decision support. It makes ordering, scheduling, and reviewing the results of diagnostic tests more efficient by allowing work to be done online rather than on paper and over the telephone.