This Week’s Question

Can something be done regarding the delay in getting radiology reports read? It is taking over two weeks for reports to be completed. This is delaying patient care. Our surgeons are having to reschedule important appointments because there are no results to review. Sometimes surgeries are also being delayed because of this. Can we hire more radiologists to avoid this in the future?

Thank you for the question, which I’ve shared with leaders in Radiology. They are actively interviewing and hiring radiologists, and also have partnered with a remote radiology team, DocPanel, which is to go live in a matter of days, with the capability of interpreting 150 studies per day. This will greatly help attack the backlog of reads and get us back to appropriate turnaround times for radiology studies final reads.

Dr. Leo Wolansky, chair of our Department of Imaging and Therapeutics, reports we in fact have broken our record for annual productivity each of the last six years, and despite the increasing scarcity of radiologists, we have approved five additional lines for in-residence faculty radiologists.

The radiology team had been short-staffed, but between the new teleradiology service and two new faculty arriving in July, the landscape is getting better and we will see improvement in the reading times.

Thank you for raising this. I appreciate your concern over potential delays in patient care.

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