Over the years reforms have continuously shown in the health care organizations, including payment reforms that have shifted from the traditional fee to a fee for quality service. The patient outcome and patient satisfaction are the determinants of the cost of service, especially in the radiology field. Collecting of appropriate data, analyzing it, identification of opportunities is crucial in exploring factors that affect patient perception and satisfaction. This paper deals with the improvement of radiologist’s care and above all ways of ensuring imaging departments create and managing effective programs through appropriate programs.
However, the structure and attention of these programs can contrast due to the large number of components that exist in health organizations. Components delegated to regulate the field of radiology which includes customer service, staff assessment, education, process improvement, and patient safety. Each of them requires specific programs to necessitate their performance by analyzing their data, change implementation and ensure that regulatory requirements are met. Many confusing terminologies characterize the quality management field, specifically patient safety and performance improvement. Many processes can be introduced to check on the quality and safety management under radiologists’ assurance to serve as a cog in the vast institution culture of safety. The primary solution for the health organization is to improve the effectiveness of radiologist services (Papp, 2018).
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The health management industries are required to know who their customers are; it is an approach of impacting patient satisfaction. To find the factors that their customers base their evaluations of quality assurance from, how to measure the customers’ satisfaction level and how to balance technological and interpersonal skills. It is how improved efficiency is related to improved patient outcome. Their system should incorporate proper messaging, transparency in physician involvement, build of trust within each quality initiative and open communication.
Back to the Atrius Centre, MRI department; the successful implementation was the embedding of appropriate scheduling rules. The results for the questionnaires and service quality tool showed that there was a problem in the waiting time of patients and the utilization of MRI machine. High access times for MRI facilities have a surprisingly adverse effect on patient service and quality of care. It is because of the scarcity and expensive they are. Better utilization of these resources is the best way of reducing access times. The patient appointments are not scheduled effectively; thus the best way of reducing access time is through scheduling optimization.
The tool I embedded in the department is (CDS) clinical decision support software. It mainly assisted clinicians’ order the most suitable diagnostic imaging test for the patients; in addition, it was used to make the department safer and efficient. However, it was only possible when integrated into an electronic medical record system. Staff involved in scheduling had difficulty in identifying patients with implanted defibrillators and pacemakers who needed MRI exams. There was a communication barrier between the requestors of MRI exams and the general department; this resulted in disorganized workflow and disrupted exam schedule (Siewert et al., 2016).
Occasionally the department received patients with implanted defibrillators and those with pacemakers, scanning for both required a device representative and an electro-physiologist to be available for the exam. With the misinformation of schedulers about the patients with devices, they unexpectedly found out that their MRI exam appointments had been rescheduled. It created dissatisfaction of both the patients and the general departmental staff. In avoidance of future cases as such, I embedded the CDS tool that was to be developed internally, integrated and finally tested in a week.
When an MRI exam order was made for a patient, the EMR was triggered to look for the patients’ medical history, specifically for diagnostic codes that were related to defibrillators or implanted pacemakers. Detection of the code was through a warning message display, whereby the physician was directed to contact an MRI specialist for a go ahead. The implementation resulted in immediate improvement; however, skilled labor was a requirement for the proper management of the system (Gupta et al., 2013).
For many years much attention has been a quality assurance in radiology departments; this is because of the popularity in imaging services that affect patient care in health care organizations. However difficult it has been for me to measure the quality offered by radiology specialists, it is evident that the quality is determined by staff time and labor. From the analysis, patients are expecting to experience better and improved radiology services; it is of great importance for the development of standard metrics for the routine evaluation of radiological operations concerning patient care.
Measuring service quality in hospitals is of great importance due to the high involvement of risky services and the general lack of expertise possessed by clients. It is an expectation that all radiology departments maintain safety, quality and overall performance improvement programs. The components of the programs should include appropriate exploitation of quality tools and adherence to basic principles of quality management.
References
Gupta, A. K., Chowdhury, V., & Khandelwal, N. (2013). Diagnostic radiology: recent advances and applied physics in imaging . JP Medical Ltd.
Papp, J. (2018). Quality management in the imaging sciences . Elsevier Health Sciences.
Siewert, B., Brook, O. R., Hochman, M., & Eisenberg, R. L. (2016). Impact of communication errors in radiology on patient care, customer satisfaction, and work-flow efficiency. American Journal of Roentgenology , 206 (3), 573-579.
