The ideal and more thorough, systematic change would be as follows: Every patient presenting for CT or MR would be introduced to a radiologist directly.
Ideally the radiologist would be situated in a reading room with full PACS access, near at least 2 interview rooms (or 1 per scanner). Every single cross sectional imaging patient would be brought to an interview room before the study and before changing.
In a timely fashion the radiologist would enter the room, sit down, and introduce herself as a physician and a radiologist. She would explain the study, if there are questions, and that afterwards, the study will be interpreted by herself or one of her colleagues.
And after thorough review, which will take a while (i.e. after the patient has left) a full list of findings will be made available in a report for the patient’s physician who will relay the findings and the next steps.
Every patient should be provided a business card for the group, which would have a generic email address: “To contact one of our doctors, please email: imagingspecialist@university.edu”, which will only be answered by a physician. This role of the radiologist who interacts with patients would rotate to not burden one individual.
This one radiologist in the “patient relations” role could also respond to emails from patients for that day, as well as other tasks that tend to be interruptive, such as patient consents, consultation phone calls with referring clinicians, protocols, etc. (depending upon the preferences of the department/practice).
This system would maintain (or improve) the productivity of all other radiologists in the group, and that single radiologist would still be productive by answering consult calls, responding to emails, reading studies when possible, and most importantly, improving radiology’s image to patients.
The smallest, but effective change that could be implemented would be at the technologist level. Each technologist could be trained to end the exam by saying “Thank you for coming to our imaging center. The images will be reviewed by one of our radiologists, who are physician trained in interpreting imaging. He or she will write a report with the findings so you doctor will know what is on the study.
Then, your physician can discuss with you the implications of what the study has found. Please call us if you have any questions, including questions for our physician imaging specialists”. This solution requires no radiologist time, and provided it is universally instituted, it will alert every patient to the existence of Radiologists and that they are physicians. This may even be said after every single plain film study, thereby significantly increasing our exposure.
David Naeger, MD