Impact of structured reporting on developing head and neck ultrasound skills

Reports of head and neck ultrasound examinations are frequently written by hand as free texts. This is a serious obstacle to the learning process of the modality due to a missing report structure and terminology. Therefore, there is a great inter-observer variability in overall report quality. Aim of the present study was to evaluate the impact of structured reporting on the learning process as indicated by the overall report quality of head and neck ultrasound examinations within medical school education. Following an immersion course on head and neck ultrasound, previously documented images of three common pathologies were handed out to 58 medical students who asked to create both standard free text reports (FTR) and structured reports (SR). A template for structured reporting of head and neck ultrasound examinations was created using a web-based approach. FTRs and SRs were evaluated with regard to overall quality, completeness, required time to completion and readability by two independent raters (Paired Wilcoxon test, 95% CI). Ratings were assessed for inter-rater reliability (Fleiss' kappa). Additionally, a questionnaire was utilized to evaluate user satisfaction. SRs received significantly better ratings in terms of report completeness (97.7% vs. 53.5%, p