PremerusSM Diagnostic Accuracy

A New Model of Diagnostic Healthcare

The foundation of every healthcare treatment decision ultimately rests on the diagnosis. The physician's course of treatment - be it an aggressive intervention or a wait-and-see approach - is determined by the accuracy of that diagnosis. A wrong diagnosis can lead to the wrong treatment - one that not only fails to help the patient, but also carries the risk of side-effects that can be worse than the original problem.

Until now, the fundamental paradigm of healthcare has been: the best treatment delivers the best outcomes. PremerusSM shifts that paradigm: Expert diagnosis can lead to higher quality outcomes while reducing costs.

PremerusSM is founded on the principle that diagnostic accuracy can improve patient outcomes and reduce costs. This is because once the diagnosis is made, a cascade of costly treatments - including high-tech therapies, specialist visits, medications, biopsies and additional testing - are often set into motion. PremerusSM focuses on the diagnosis because it impacts all subsequent medical decisions, expenditures and outcomes.

PremerusSM can give patients, regardless of location, access to some of the nation’s leading diagnosticians to render diagnoses for their specific conditions. Getting an accurate diagnosis and the right treatment enhanced the potential for quality healthcare outcomes while minimizing patient suffering and lowering overall expense.

The Power of Specialization

As technological growth and the advancement of knowledge lead to increasing complexity in the medical field, the quality of medical outcomes can relate directly to the level of specialized knowledge the physician has in a particular area. However, as diagnostic technology, equipment and procedures have advanced rapidly, recent evidence suggests that specialized human diagnostic expertise to use the technology may not have evolved accordingly to diagnose with accuracy and confidence.

Specialization makes the difference

A recent mammography study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that while some physicians failed to identify breast cancer 71% of the time, other physicians were highly accurate with an error rate of only 3%. It was the degree of specialization and the volume of experience that made the difference. Physicians who interpreted 2,500 to 4,000 specialized studies per year had the lowest misdiagnosis rate.1

The traditional jack-of-all-trades approach

Today, a practice exists whereby radiological diagnostic tests may be read by generalists – not specialists. An imaging facility might have a single radiologist on staff to read its studies – an individual who might be called upon to make precise diagnoses for all conditions, regardless of disease state, body part or diagnostic modality. This forces diagnosticians into a jack-of-all-trades scenario.

PremerusSM harnesses the power of specialization

PremerusSM has built the first diagnostic platform that delivers access to the specialty expertise of some of the nation’s leading diagnostic physicians. PremerusSM uses proprietary technology to match individual cases with diagnostic specialists and then transmit the clinical data and images to them for expeditious review. By matching physicians across the country with expert diagnostic skills to individual cases based on the clinical needs of each patient, PremerusSM connects the patient with an appropriate diagnostic expert.

Certified PremerusSM Experts

PremerusSM quality is built around the patent-pending Certified PremerusSM Expert process, which align reading physicians with their specific area of expertise in order to promote sub-specialization within the radiology community.

Rigorous credentialing standards

PremerusSM reading radiologists must show documented experience, board certification, advanced training, and peer recognition in a specialization. They also must pass a rigorous testing and credentialing program. What's more, PremerusSM analyzes the outcomes of their previously diagnosed patients that includes evaluation of actual studies and are monitored through statistical analysis. PremerusSM uses sophisticated data analysis to identify clinical expertise for specific body parts and medical conditions.

Access to PremerusSM expertise

The PremerusSM platform uses proprietary technology to:

1. Categorize each patient's clinical needs according to diagnostic specializations,
2. Identify the most relevant specialist within the PremerusSM Platform to assess the case,
3. Transfer the clinical information and radiology images to the selected specialist and
4. Provide a specialist-rendered diagnosis back to the treating physician.

The intent behind getting to an experienced physician based on the patient's specific condition, is to help improve the accuracy of the diagnosis and the patient's outcome. This also aims at eliminating downstream healthcare costs as a result of an equivocal diagnosis.

Advancing Clinical Accuracy

The goal of PremerusSM is to increase diagnostic accuracy by employing appropriately qualified radiologists to read MR, CT, PET and mammography studies. It is based on a simple principle: The more experience a radiologist has in diagnosing for a specific condition the more likely he or she will deliver an accurate diagnosis. PremerusSM strives to increase accuracy through:

1. EXPERTS – Certified PremerusSM Experts read and interpret all diagnostic tests and studies.
2. SELECTION – Reading radiologist selection is based on documented and tested clinical expertise for a specific modality.
3. TECHNOLOGY – PremerusSM uses proprietary technology to match the tests with the most appropriate PremerusSM specialist.
4. REPORTING – PremerusSM uses a structured diagnostic format and uniform lexicon for diagnostic reports.