Because we believe that every patient deserves the best care all the time, Diversified Radiology continuously and diligently works on its quality measures to ensure accurate and timely results.
Peer Review
To ensure ongoing focus on clinical quality we have dedicated administrative staff that coordinates with our physician leadership to design and maintain peer review and educational requirements. We work closely with our hospital partners to report and refine our efforts in these areas.
Our comprehensive QA process does not allow our radiologists to “pre-screen” the cases they review, which helps ensure a broad, randomized assessment of report accuracy by radiologist and across the group as a whole. Our peer review results continuously outperform national average statistics.
Structured Reports
Our Quality and Values Committee is constantly striving to deliver greater efficiencies and measures for our partner hospitals. A recent area of focus has been on the development of structured reports and follow-up recommendations. The end result is a benefit to the patient by improving miss rates, making the reports more easily understood (which leads to fewer miscommunications) and providing quicker diagnoses by increasing radiologist efficiencies.
US Radiology’s Center for Quality
Our partnership with US Radiology Specialists allows us access to and participation in a national Quality Assurance Committee in which we are able to identify best practices in greater detail and at a much larger scale. Through this resource we are able to refine our processes in peer review, direct radiologist-to-patient communications and follow-up of incidental findings, just to name a few.
Primary Objectives:
- Improve Patient Care
- Maximize Clinical Outcomes
- Demonstrate & Quantify Value
- Thrive in Value-based Reimbursement Landscape
US Radiology is committed to investing in quality to provide the highest level of patient care and ultimately demonstrate value to payors and health systems.
Patient Safety
Because patient safety is so important, we are dedicated to the development of useful and effective measures to ensure the highest level of care. As such, we have created screening protocols for exams insisting that contrast be used only when necessary.
Additionally, we are developing more stringent protocols for reducing radiation doses throughout the practice, and have worked extensively with our hospital partners to encourage radiation safety. We are passionate about ensuring that patients undergo only the exams that are absolutely necessary and with the smallest risk possible. For those reasons, we created a CT Shielding Recommendation guide to assist our partner hospitals in reaching our goals of the continuous improvement in patient safety.
Specific examples of our collaborative approach to patient safety are our enhanced protocols for stroke alerts and parathyroid imaging patients. Our neuroradiologists are involved in the patient’s stroke care before imaging starts. This assures that the most appropriate imaging is ordered and facilitates rapid interpretation of the patient’s exams. In addition, our physicians are in constant contact with the stroke neurologist and ED physician while the patient is in the department to expedite appropriate care.
Our advanced approach to parathyroid imaging duplicates the angle and anatomy that a surgeon is going to encounter during surgery. This method potentially reduces intraoperative time during neck exploration and also allows for better visualization of complex neck anatomy. This technique increases our sensitivity to find occult disease without artifacts frequently encountered in most protocols. An additional benefit is that radiation dose can be lowered since the focused anatomy is raised above the shoulders, which require higher doses of radiation to obtain imaging of the neck at that level.
We have come a long way in determining the efficacy of lower radiation doses while upholding image quality and diagnostic accuracy. As we move forward with this work, patients will continue to benefit and our partner hospitals will be able to promote the safety and value that the service line brings to the community.