From the March 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

Another goal of the Alliance has been to enhance education and user support for imaging equipment in the pediatric population and to tailor equipment to pediatric patients. In these important areas its success has been far-reaching: through the FDA’s Initiative to Reduce Unnecessary Radiation Exposure for Medical Imaging in 2009, the Pediatric Information for Xray Imaging Device Premarket Notifications in 2012 and the FDA publication Guidance Document for Industry for Pediatric Information for Xray Imaging Device Premarket Notifications in 2017.

Image Gently’s message has also not been lost on industry, which has become involved in the enterprise of quality and safety, introducing dose alerts and notifications, improved detector efficiency, adaptive collimation, tube current modulation, prospective gating and iterative reconstruction, greatly reducing the dose necessary for diagnostic examinations in children and patients of all ages, promoted by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association. The ACR registries have served to determine and publish diagnostic reference ranges for both thoracic and abdominal pediatric imaging to promulgate national standards for dose optimization. The reputation of the Image Gently Alliance has also allowed it to become a source for other agencies, such as The Joint Commission, and even for watchdog publications in the lay press.


Think-A-Head: Looking toward the future
With the rollout of the Think-A-Head campaign in November 2016, the Alliance is looking forward to its next 10 years, widening its focus and scope from a primary concentration on dose reduction to “an emphasis on appropriate and informed use and on the value of the imaging findings.” This campaign focused not just on how the head CT was performed, but on evidence-based criteria on whether it should be performed at all, and was the product of collaboration with our clinical colleagues working on behalf of their respective societies. Reflective of this deeper focal length, the Alliance has officially changed its name from The Alliance for Radiation Protection in Pediatric Imaging, which orchestrated the Image Gently Campaign, to the Image Gently Alliance.

The Image Gently Alliance seeks to become even more transparent and inclusive, widening the latitude of its Steering Committee to include adult radiologists, community practitioners and patient representatives. The Have-a-Heart Campaign, released in the spring of 2017, was also the product of collaboration with our clinical colleagues and their respective societies, and included an open-source position statement, which was endorsed by 13 separate organizations, including the American College of Radiology (ACR), the Society for Pediatric Radiology (SPR), the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC).

March 2018 Magazine

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