Due to a looming staffing shortage, radiology services in Scotland are slouching toward a preventable crisis, according to the health correspondent at The Scotsman.

Utilization reviewers seeking to ascertain whether MRI was inappropriately ordered for low-back pain might assume that direct review of patients’ charts would tilt toward patient empathy while aloof analysis of claims data would reflect a higher bar to clear. They would be wrong.

Healthcare-economics experts in the Great Lakes State are preparing to tuck into a health-system makeover project that, they hope, will eventually yield tight care coordination—and thus substantial resource savings—on a grand scale. 

Actionable awareness of radiation concerns is spotty in the emergency department, with midlevel providers who order imaging (mainly nurse practitioners and physician assistants) making factual errors and emergency-medicine residents shying away from counseling patients about imaging-related radiation risks. And attending docs struggle with the counseling piece too.  

Harvard Medical School has introduced a publicly accessible, fully digital “library of evidence” to guide clinicians in their imaging decisions.

Analyzing patterns of change in deficiencies common to radiation-oncology practices, researchers have found that earning accreditation from the American College of Radiology (ACR) equips these practices with a reliable, peer-reviewed means of assessing their adherence to national standards. 

In one fell swoop, a medical school in upstate New York has beefed up its radiology faculty by 35 radiologists. In the process, it’s done nothing less than relaunch a long dormant residency program. 

In the Journal of the American College of Radiology, author Richard E. Heller III, MD, MBA, recently concluded an article by saying radiology needs a “new and gradable standard” for written radiology reports. Is this a good idea? A bad one?