Ensuring follow-up care is a persistent challenge in healthcare. Even in well-resourced systems, it often depends on memory, manual workarounds, and fragmented communication across clinical teams. When orders get lost, results aren’t communicated, or patients miss critical next steps, the consequences can lead to delayed diagnoses, unnecessary anxiety, or missed opportunities for treatment.
This HealthLeaders Media article, “Follow-Up Imaging is Challenging—Here’s How to Improve It”, spotlights an important shift in how leading organizations are addressing missed follow-up recommendations. St. Tammany Health System sits at the center of this movement and stands as an industry leader in combining high-reliability principles with advanced AI from Inflo Health to close the loop on follow-up care.
Why Follow-Up Imaging is So Complex
As the article explains, follow-up imaging requires a coordinated chain of actions across multiple people and systems:
- Radiologists must clearly identify findings that require follow-up
- Ordering providers must receive, understand, and act on recommendations
- Scheduling teams need to contact patients and ensure appointments are booked
- Patients must follow through, often weeks or months later, sometimes across different locations or providers
When any link in this chain breaks, the patient’s follow-up can be delayed or missed entirely.
Traditional approaches have relied heavily on individual effort and vigilance, which is why variability and inconsistency are common, even among skilled, committed teams. This is where St. Tammany’s approach stands out.
A High-Reliability Framework
High-reliability organizations (HROs) apply structured, standardized processes to eliminate unnecessary variation and minimize the risk of failure. In clinical imaging follow-up, that means:
- Automating the identification of follow-up recommendations
- Embedding those recommendations directly into the EHR and clinical workflows
- Assigning clear ownership for follow-up actions
- Tracking completion in real-time to ensure nothing falls through the cracks
At St. Tammany, these principles have been built into the follow-up imaging process through Inflo Health’s AI-enabled platform. The result is a system that doesn’t depend on memory or manual tracking. It is proactive, automated, and accountable.
Inflo Health’s Role
Inflo Health’s technology was designed from the ground up for healthcare’s high-stakes environment. Unlike general-purpose AI, Inflo’s platform is purpose-built for clinical setting, trained on real medical data, and engineered to integrate directly with EHR workflows.
In practice, this means:
- Automated Detection – The system flags follow-up needs from radiology reports using large language models optimized for medical language.
- Workflow Integration – Recommendations are routed to the right providers and staff automatically, with no need to jump between systems.
- Tracking & Accountability – Every follow-up is logged, monitored, and tracked until complete, ensuring visibility at every step.
For St. Tammany, this has meant a dramatic reduction in manual effort, fewer missed follow-ups, and a measurable improvement in patient safety.
The Bigger Picture
The HealthLeaders Media feature underscores that improving follow-up isn’t just an operational win, it’s a patient safety imperative. Every missed follow-up is a potential missed diagnosis. Every delay can mean progression of disease that might have been caught earlier.
By building a high-reliability follow-up process, St. Tammany is reducing risk, improving quality, and creating a better experience for both patients and providers. Their work offers a roadmap for other organizations facing the same challenge.
A Model for the Future
As healthcare continues to balance increasing imaging volumes with limited resources, the organizations that succeed will be those that:
- Embed follow-up processes into existing workflows
- Use AI and automation to reduce manual work
- Maintain a relentless focus on reliability and accountability
St. Tammany Health System is demonstrating that. with tools like Inflo Health’s platform, this approach can be scaled across departments, facilities, and health systems.
Read the Full Story
To learn more about St. Tammany Health System’s approach, the challenges of follow-up imaging, and why a high-reliability framework is key to solving them, read the full HealthLeaders Media article here:
Follow-Up Imaging is Challenging—Here’s How to Improve It
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