From the July 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
By Chris Austin
The vision for digital health came to me almost 15 years ago when I made the decision to specialize in radiology.
It’s a promising vision that has been consistently articulated – increased productivity, better quality, greater accessibility, more personalization and, subsequently, improved patient outcomes. Part of my rationale for choosing the profession was a personal penchant for emerging digital capabilities in imaging. I believed the digital revolution would transform the specialty, make radiologists better doctors, benefit patients and, when possible, ensure I got home in time for dinner each night.
But after experiencing moderate advancements in health care as other industries underwent massive and more rapid transformation, I realized that the vision needed more champions. It needed more people at various stages of their careers who saw digital technology’s potential to help clinicians do their jobs better and like their jobs more. It needed more people willing to lead health care into its digital future.
See the opportunity
The first step in any change involves recognizing potential in the “new.” The radiology community faces numerous emerging trends and challenges, most of which could be tackled with smart, well integrated digital solutions. For example, burnout is a critical professional issue and has been shown to be greater among diagnostic radiologists than the mean for all physicians. The global shortage of radiologists poses an additional threat, impacting not only developing countries but also many developed nations. In parts of the U.K., close to 10 percent of vacant posts go unfilled. These challenges won’t be solved by sticking to the status quo or expecting more radiologists to suddenly enter the workforce.
There may be some doubts about digital health and the changes it will bring, and that’s OK. Acknowledging doubts will help ensure lessons learned from the past can be used to improve solutions of the future. But it’s also important to appreciate how new technologies and tools can address issues like burnout as well as the pressure put on all clinicians to do more and do better with less. By taking a progressive, yet pragmatic, approach to change, radiologists can help drive the industry forward while ensuring the solutions created and implemented work best and seamlessly for them.
Be the disrupter
In health care, disruption is about using digital capabilities in a way that ensures all members of a patient’s care team are working at the top of their licenses. For radiology, this means questioning why an experienced radiology professional may spend hours each week vetting imaging requests, when electronic clinical decision support tools, based on an agreed evidence base, may be available for the referring physician to consult. And as health care continues to move toward greater standardization around care delivery, it means questioning the sensibility of using the radiologist to protocol every CT and MR order when this could be automated in most cases. It’s hard to justify avoiding digital technology, when the solutions have the potential to safely deliver the same, if not better, outcomes while giving the radiologist more time to focus on the most complex cases.
