Radiology businesses are continuously working toward reinforcing their value while dealing with an evolving landscape. Factors include changing reimbursement plans, the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the prevalence of Clinical Decision Support (CDS) tools.
In turn, this presents a fast-paced and fiercely competitive healthcare landscape. Radiologists must prioritize activities that minimize report turn-around times, and businesses look for ways to lower costs while improving productivity.
These changes should improve care quality, but understanding and monitoring impact is a persistent challenge. Access to performance analytics aren’t always readily available directly to the individuals that need it; often times, IT and analysts need to prepare reports that may be outdated once delivered. Giving radiologists and other staff easy access to critical performance data can ensure personal and organizational success.
Working Together to Understand Clinical and Business Performance
Once analytics are available, the next step is to bring clinical and administrative leadership together to identify KPIs that measure clinical, operational, and financial performance.
At a minimum, leaders should work together to:
- Understand the clinical value and productive impact of non-diagnostic activities such as dose monitoring, managing imaging appropriateness, critical results reporting, CDS, and tracking follow-up recommendations.
- Evaluate individual productivity and quality performance against personal and group goals.
- Obtain timely and continuous feedback that can quickly help improve individual performance.
- Track clinical outcome improvement activities, care information, and cost measures according to established plans.
Radiology businesses benefit when leadership embraces metrics that support cost-saving and quality improvement initiatives.
Helping Radiologists Monitor and Improve Performance
Tools that help radiologists with immediate feedback on their contributions and progress toward goals are beneficial for two reasons. The first is that understanding individual performance can help improve both clinical quality and job satisfaction by surfacing areas of high performance as well as areas of needed improvement. The second is that improved performance, whether individually or collectively, improves the overall performance of an organization.
A sophisticated but easy-to-use business operations platform allows radiologists to look at their own performance data. And since their data is sourced from the same platform as their colleagues, this ultimately builds trust in its accuracy. And the right platform can empower them to easily personalize the metrics they need, including:
- Overall CDS use by specialty, facility, or referring physician
- Referrer or patient follow-up rates by radiologist
- Prevalence of inappropriate exams by modality, exam type, or ordering physician
- Screening exam callback rates by exam type, location, or technologist
The Importance of Broad Access to Actionable Insights
Access to self-service analytics means that every member of the organization who needs access can get access to data that is relevant to them, in real-time, without having to rely on analysts or IT staff to provide it. The relevancy of analytics to an individual means that they can interpret it to take steps that improve the function of their own role, and collectively, the performance of the organization; i.e., staff have access to actionable insights that are critical to the success of any organization. Making those insights easily available to everyone across an organization builds trust, drives engagement, reduces burnout, and sets the radiology business of operational efficiency with reduced costs and improved profitability.
HealthLevel’s Foundations™ is the leading radiology business operations platform. By combining clinical, financial, and operational data, it uses analytics to paint a complete picture of a business’s operations. Foundations™ engages every team member to confidently take action to improve productivity and increase the bottom line. Learn more.
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