Original article
Flying in the Plane You Service: Patient-Centered Radiology

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacr.2009.10.017Get rights and content

If you were about to undergo a radiologic procedure, what 5 things would you want? The authors propose a construct for patient-centered radiology. Five wishes of a prospective radiology patient are described: 1) the information to choose, 2) the right examination, 3) a safe examination, 4) effective communication of correctly interpreted results, and 5) a fair price. The authors posit that the American practice of radiology would be considerably different if our profession practiced patient-centered radiology.

Section snippets

What Is Patient-Centered Radiology?

If you were a radiology patient, we propose that you would have 5 wishes:

  • 1

    the information to choose,

  • 2

    the right examination,

  • 3

    a safe examination,

  • 4

    effective communication of correctly interpreted results, and

  • 5

    a fair price.

Measurement and Transparency

As the radiology profession struggles with global market forces that threaten to sweep us into the vortex of commoditization, we must understand that quality improvement is the best strategy to objectively distinguish our practice as superior. Otherwise it will be just about cost. The best route is to achieve distinction through the eyes of patients.

Gregory Mankiw, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisors in 2004, noted that America no longer had a comparative advantage in

Conclusion

Patient-centered radiology goes beyond traditional boundaries, forcing us to go beyond subspecialty board certification and our guild. It forces us into the professional position of looking at our work as if we were mechanics fixing the planes we know we will fly in.

When we think about patients, the game changes—it literally changes. When radiologists interpret CT images of patients after viewing photographs of the patients, their detection rates increase substantially. In fact, approximately

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