Heralding another important use for electronic medical records, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) plans to require that radiology information be logged on health record systems such as Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault.

A policy announced this week will oblige makers of CT and other radiation-producing imaging systems used at NIH clinics to include capabilities that will track radiation doses and then enter  that information on patients' electronic medical records.

"All vendors who sell imaging equipment to Radiology and Imaging Sciences at the NIH Clinical Center will be required to provide a routine means for radiation dose exposure to be recorded in the electronic medical record," said David A. Bluemke, MD, director of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at the NIH Clinical Center. "This requirement will allow cataloging of radiation exposures from these medical tests."

Scanner manufacturers such as GE Healthcare, Siemens Medical, and Toshiba will be among those affected by the new rules aimed at keeping track of the considerable radiation put out by CT scanners, which are much stronger than X-rays and have gone into much more widespread use over the past 30 years.

"The cancer risk from low-dose medical radiation tests is largely unknown. Yet it is clear that the U.S. population is increasingly being exposed to more diagnostic-test-derived ionizing radiation than in the past," said Bluemke.

While the NIH expects that most radiation measurements will be entered onto Microsoft and Google platforms, the plan, in the coming years, is for the data to eventually be tracked on nationwide networks.

In the meantime, it's expected that information made available to the NIH on EMRs will eventually also be accessible by hospitals.

"The next step," said a spokesman for GE Healthcare, "is for cross-industry coordination among all stakeholders involved in a patient's care so that standardized dose-related information can be captured and recorded in as convenient and usable format as possible."