It’s My Kind of Town
December 03, 2009
Blurry evidence of my Twitter triumph from the RSNA Bulletin.
Well, I’m getting ready to bid Chicago a fond farewell for another year. But what a great RSNA! I got to sit in on some amazing sessions, check out some fascinating new technology, eat out at exquisite restaurants, speak more French than I have in years and check out the Redhead Piano Bar. I also had my first-ever lunch in the RSNA Bistro courtesy of the RSNA Twitter Team, who picked one of my tweets as their “top tweet” on Tuesday and bestowed me with a free ticket as a prize! (Shameless plug: follow us on Twitter too at twitter.com/imagingbiz.) I think the most interesting new technology I saw was cloud computing, which has the potential to totally disrupt the informatics side of the industry. And my favorite session was Dr. Paramjit Chopra’s reality check for rads.
What about you? What did you learn, what did you love, what did you loathe? Leave a comment and fill us in. Safe travels!
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Thursday Bits and Bytes: Get in Touch with Your Inner Emily Post
December 03, 2009
As the ACR wages its campaign to give the “Face of Radiology” a major nip and tuck, new research out of UPenn indicates that getting in touch with your inner Emily Post and sending a thank-you letter can go a long way toward improving your patients’ perception of you—and of the profession. In the study, Dr. Rajan Agarwal and his colleagues sent thank-you letters with a survey to almost 5,000 patients, and surveys without thank-you letters to another 5,000 or so. The results showed that patients who received the letter were more likely to recommend UPenn’s radiology department to others. “If we as a profession want to improve the face of radiology, we all have to start thinking of new, creative ways of increasing time with patients or at least increasing their knowledge of our role in their care,” Agarwal said.
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Crystal Ball: Ultrasound in 2015
December 02, 2009
Tonight I stopped by a session on where ultrasound will be in 2015, kicked off by John Cronan, MD, with these heartening words: “This topic hasn’t gotten any cleaner, and in fact, I think it’s gotten more complicated. The issue of radiation has made it more complex. My prediction is that ultrasound in 2015 will be doing great, but imaging’s control of it will be less than it today.”
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RSNA 2009 Attendance: What’s the Verdict?
December 02, 2009
This year’s RSNA meeting is winding down, and I still haven’t heard much of a verdict on attendance. Some vendor friends have estimated that it’s down 20%. The Society itself claims it’s hovering between 57,000 and 60,000, right around last year’s levels. I know I’ve been hearing a lot of foreign languages, and everyone seems to agree that international attendance is up. A Philips rep from Paris was kind enough to let my try out some of my college French on him (sample line: “Je blog le rencontre”) and it was his opinion that there are more radiologists here from France than from any other foreign country. And finally, I’m hearing that a lot of vendors brought smaller teams this year, an understandable response to a tough year in the industry. All I know is that I haven’t had any trouble getting a shuttle bus, and believe me, I ain’t complaining. How has attendance seemed to you?
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Wednesday Bits and Bytes: Ultrasound Can Reduce Breast Biopsies
December 02, 2009
Research presented today at RSNA indicates that the use of targeted breast ultrasound can reduce biopsies in women under the age of 40. Two studies used targeted ultrasound to distinguish between potentially cancerous masses and benign findings in young women who had detected lumps in their breasts. The incidence of malignancy ranged from just 0.4% to 2%. “It is time we used ultrasound to reduce unnecessary morbidity and costs associated with more aggressive invasive approaches,” said the lead author of one of the studies.
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Leveraging Health IT to Improve Quality and Safety
December 02, 2009
“You can’t improve what you can’t measure.” Boy, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that phrase in the past four days . . . well, I wouldn’t be a rich woman, yet, but I would have a pocketful of change. But what does that phrase mean for health IT? In two short words: data mining. The importance of that capability, as well as several others, was the focus of this morning’s session on next generation IT requirements for improving quality and safety.
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How Not to Wind Up Like MIDI and West Valley
December 02, 2009
This morning I popped in on a session focused on Medicare fraud and abuse. Stuart Langbein, JD, offered “tales from the front line” – and as a lawyer dealing with Medicare fraud issues, he had plenty of material to discuss. “There’s been a lot of attention paid in the past decade to health care fraud and abuse, and I think we’re only going to see that continue,” he said. “Congress is going to pump more money into fraud and abuse efforts with health care reform.”
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What You Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Cosmetic CT
December 01, 2009
Jonathan Berlin offered an interesting case study during this evening’s “Dos and Don’ts” session on strategic planning and marketing. “This will get us thinking about some of the things people have done wrong in the past,” he said. The case he discussed dates back to 2001, when two businesspeople decided to lease an EBCT scanner to perform whole body scans, cardiac and lung scans and virtual colonoscopy. He called the fledgling cosmetic imaging company “Life CT.”
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Tuesday Bits and Bytes: Mammo Ups Breast Cancer Risk?
December 01, 2009
Amidst a hurricane of controversy surrounding the US Preventative Services Task Force’s new mammography screening recommendations comes fresh research presented today at RSNA 2009: low-dose radiation from annual mammography screening could up the risk of developing breast cancer in some high-risk women. In a retrospective study of high-risk women, those who were exposed to low-dose radiation experienced a risk of breast cancer 1.5 times that of high-risk women not exposed to radiation. “Our findings suggest that low-dose radiation increases breast cancer risk among these young high-risk women, and a careful approach is warranted,” said the study’s lead author.
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Toward Quantitative Imaging: A Tour of the Reading Room of the Future
December 01, 2009
A new feature at this year’s RSNA, the Radiology Reading Room of the Future incorporates 15 displays from leading academic institutions and vendors showcasing the potential—and power—of quantitative imaging. Our gallery of the Reading Room takes you inside the Lakeside Learning Center so you can see all the action!
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Zero Defects: Is It Possible?
December 01, 2009
Lucy Glenn, MD, spoke this morning on strategies for minimizing errors in diagnostic imaging. She began by discussing the concept of “zero defects”: “We as health care workers have to change our mindset,” she said. “What the typical organization wants is very few defects. We have to embrace what the patient wants, which is no defects. We have to get to a mindset where we think that perfection is possible and injuries are avoidable.”
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Anatomy of an Error
December 01, 2009
This morning’s sessions on quality improvement continued with Jonathan Kruskal, MD, PhD, focusing on safety and risk management in radiology. His presentation, “Anatomy and Pathophysiology of Radiological Errors,” kicked off with a quote from AJR: “It is not the occurrence of error that is damning, but the failure to seize on it as an opportunity for improvement.”
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Scientific Methodology for Performance Assessment
December 01, 2009
Quality improvement. It’s the phrase on everyone’s lips at this year’s RSNA, and several sessions this morning will focus on the nuts and bolts of the process, providing a roadmap for making concrete steps toward practice improvement. Dr. James Duncan spoke on using the scientific method to assess physician performance. “The public is spending an incredible amount of money on health care,” he said, “and their impression is that they’re not getting their money’s worth.”
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