Vendors and value

Much has been made in recent years about combatting the commoditization of radiology by increasing the specialty’s value to the care continuum and the healthcare system as a whole rather than just offering interpretations from a reading room. Two of this week’s top stories focused on institutions that took steps to improve efficiency on their own, though one of the groups is asking for more help from vendors.

The first story comes from Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, where staff realized that patients coming in for ultrasound-guided thyroid fine-needle aspiration (FNA) were left waiting for two or three hours after check-in before the actual procedure took place.

After gathering a team to examine existing workflows, radiology department staff found two issues: there was a bottleneck due to limited space availability in the pre/postprocedure care area (PPCA) and the times when thyroid FNAs were scheduled, typically in the early afternoon, were among the busiest periods of the workday.

Equipped with this information, Emory made a couple minor tweaks that made a big difference. They move the consent process from the PPCA to the ultrasound suite, and shifted FNA appointments to begin at 8 a.m. A study of nearly 300 procedures spanning the pre- and postintervention period showed that wait times were practically cut in half, averaging 167 minutes under the old workflow and being as quick as 80 minutes under the new workflow.

The second study of an improvement in efficiency deals not with procedures, but with technology. Young Han Lee, MD, PhD, of the Research Institute of Radiological Science at Yonsei University College of Medicine in Seoul, and colleagues were looking for a way of speeding the tedious process of drawing a region of interest (ROI) and then manually inputting the statistical values from the selected region.

Lee and colleagues created a simple module using open-source software that combined an optical character recognition tool with a macro function to automatically read and extract ROI values into a spreadsheet. The module was 100 percent accurate, and took roughly one-fifth the time of manual entry.

In the study text, published in Academic Radiology, Lee and colleagues wondered why their commercially available PACS didn’t already have a function to automatically save or copy ROI values, and called for this and other increased functionality to be included in the next generation of PACS.

“We expect further potential applications in radiologic reading, such as ROI subtraction on in-phase and opposed-phase MR of the adrenal gland, ROI comparison of the fat fraction map of an MR image, and a comparison of the Hounsfield unit in CT scans,” wrote the authors.

Just as radiology must demonstrate increasing value in the current era of healthcare, the vendors that offer the most useful tools to improve radiologist efficiency will be the ones that thrive going forward.

-Evan Godt
Editor – Health Imaging