Unifying the Silos of Subspecialized Radiology: The Essential Role of the General Radiologist.

As radiology becomes increasingly subspecialized, conversations focus on whether the general radiologist is trending toward extinction. Current data indicate that the vast majority of graduating radiology residents now seek fellowship training. Practicing entirely within the narrow confines of one's fellowship subspecialty area, however, is uncommon, with recent data indicating that more than half of all radiologists spend the majority of their work effort as generalists. From the traditional concept of the generalist as the non-fellowship-trained radiologist who interprets everything to the multispecialty-trained radiologist to the emergency radiologist who is a subspecialist but reads across the traditional anatomic divisions, the general radiologist of today and the future is one who remains broadly skilled and equipped to provide a wide spectrum of radiologic services. The successful future of many practices of all types and the specialty as a whole will require ongoing collaborative partnerships that include both general and subspecialized radiologists. This review article highlights various scenarios in which general radiologists provide value to different types of radiology practices.

Efficiency Analysis of an Interoperable Healthcare Operations Platform.

(1) Develop an enterprise platform to unify isolated information, software applications and team members. (2) Assess the efficiency of one benefit of the platform through comparative testing of employee document retrieval times. (3) Evaluate the level of satisfaction among our target audience. We developed an infrastructure to integrate information throughout our practice and make it available on a unified, secure, and remotely accessible platform. We solicited our practice for volunteers to test the new system. All interested volunteers participated. Thirteen employees searched for the same four items in both the new system and our legacy systems. Testing was performed in the pre-deployment stage. In our evaluation, we introduced an innovative method to precisely and objectively obtain data through the use of a widely available tool which could be leveraged for a variety of other studies. On average, it took our participants 7 min and 48 s to find four assigned items in our legacy systems. It only took our volunteers 1 min and 1 s to find the same items with the new platform (p-value 0.002). On a scale of 10 being the highest level of satisfaction, participants ranked the new system to be 8.7 while the traditional system was ranked at 6.3. An overarching enterprise platform is critical due to the ability to unify otherwise isolated applications, people and documents. Because navigating a new system would be expected to take longer than a familiar one, we were surprised by the dramatically improved efficiency and satisfaction of our new interoperable platform compared to the status quo. Since this platform was evaluated in the pre-deployment stage, we expect results to improve with employee experience as well as ongoing enhancements.