Our success in diabetic eye screening depends on our ability to accurately grade the retinal images we capture at screening clinics.
As national grading lead for the NHS Diabetic Eye Screening (DES) Programme, I know that good internal quality assurance (IQA) of grading is essential to:
- ensure graders are not missing referable disease
- prevent harm to patients
DES software contains automated sampling that sends a minimum 10% of the images we grade normal (R0M0 or ‘no disease’) to be reviewed by second level graders.
To monitor grader performance effectively, grading leads must identify and investigate any cases in this 10% sample where first level graders have missed referable disease.
Extracting data for this 10% IQA sample can be time consuming but Grant Duncan, head of DES clinical services at 1st Retinal Screen Ltd and chair of the British Association of Retinal Screening (BARS), has just made it a whole lot easier.
Grant has put together the following four short videos to guide users through the process of extracting the data from the optomize software provided by Digital Healthcare, the biggest DES software supplier (56 of the 71 local programmes in England use Digital Healthcare software).
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