Vital Guard makes the discovery, disclosure, and communication process simple for clinical staff responsible for reporting new findings to patients that were not addressed during the time of treatment.
Incidental radiology findings are common in the hospital, ED, and urgent care setting. Despite this, the vast majority of these findings are not disclosed to patients. Vital Guard closes this gap: it reads clinical documentation and radiology reports to identify when there is a gap in communication around an incidental finding, and makes it simple to communicate that finding to the patient.
How It Works
Vital ingests imaging tests from the facility and uses a large language model on radiology reports to identify incidental findings. Provider notes provide additional context.
For each finding, Vital Guard determines:
Risk, whether the finding matches a set of known, commonly benign patterns (for example, a simple cyst or calcified granuloma), or whether the radiologist explicitly noted it as non-malignant or advised no follow-up. Findings that don't match one of these lower-risk patterns are treated as needing review.
Disclosure, whether the finding was already communicated to the patient or included in discharge instructions, determined from provider notes after the visit ends.
When a finding appears to carry risk and hasn't yet been disclosed to the patient, Vital Guard creates a clinical task for staff to review.
The Clinician Worklist
Clinical staff work through incidental findings from a worklist with three views:
Review, newly identified tasks awaiting a clinician's assessment.
Outreach, tasks a clinician has confirmed need patient contact.
Completed, tasks that have been resolved.
From the worklist, a clinician can open a task to see the patient's details, the finding(s) associated with it, and an activity/audit history. From there, a clinician can:
Mark the task for outreach.
Mark the task as No Action Required, selecting a reason (for example: no additional workup needed, minimal clinical risk, disclosure already documented, previously known finding, or the care team is already managing it).
Send an SMS notification to the patient. The message directs the patient to a secure link in the Vital Patient app, where the finding, follow-up instructions, and educational material are presented. The patient can review and acknowledge the notification asynchronously in the app. If the patient hasn't responded after a period of time, a reminder is sent automatically.
Log a phone call the clinician made to the patient outside the app, so it's captured in the patient's record.
A clinician can work across multiple facilities by switching between them from the same interface, and there's a separate analytics view for reporting on incidental findings across multiple facilities at once.