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Despite best efforts, every radiology practice can experience a lull in productivity. This lull can be caused by several things:
The natural response to these issues is often a desire to deploy a full load-balancing exam assignment solution. This may seem like the best solution – each radiologist is assigned a fair share of all work and they are responsible for reading those exams. What could be wrong with that?
Here are some things to consider:
The best worklist design is one that presents each radiologist with the work they should read, sorted according to the priorities of the radiology group and then fairly rewards radiologists for the work they complete.
Radiologists should be provided with real-time feedback of their productivity, radiology support teams should have tools to monitor all exams, and business leadership should have access to data and tools to monitor success and address any breakdown in the system.
Successful deployment requires a thoughtful and systematic approach to:
There are several approaches to designing the specific lists for your radiologists. This section will provide a framework for you to explore what works best for your group. Below is a description of worklists needed in each radiologists reading queue.
1. Overflow Worklist
Every practice has days or times of the day when they experience an influx of exams or some shifts get behind on important exams. An overflow worklist can be used to “call in the troops” when additional help is needed. An overflow worklist could be placed at the top of all or some shift’s reading queues. The overflow worklist would only activate when overflow conditions are met.
2. Assigned to Me and My Groups
There will always be a need to assign specific exams to a radiologist or a group of radiologists. You may have ordering physicians who have a preference for who reads their exams. Or you may have subspecialties that need to be read by a subset of radiologists within a subspecialty group. The Assigned to Me and My Groups worklist captures any exam assigned to the radiologist and any exam assigned to the radiologist’s groups.
3. Shift-specific Worklist
Each shift-specific list defines the specific type of work that needs to be read by the radiologists covering the shift. Shift-specific work could be driven by a variety of needs:
4. My Subspecialty
The My Subspecialty Sublist will show all exams for the radiologist’s subspecialty across the entire enterprise. When all other reading responsibilities are completed, radiologists can read from a subspecialty list. If you have a large practice covering many regions, you can build a subspecialty list with a regional reading preference, where subspecialists could read outside their region only when they are needed.
The key component to ensuring radiologists are each contributing their share of the work is to ensure they are properly credited for the work they complete. This starts by defining work unit values specific to your practice.
If don’t have these values already, consider one of these two options to get started:
After collecting data for several weeks, you can calculate work unit values per exam based on time-in-dictation statistics from your own practice.
Once a radiologist is presented with the perfect worklist and once they feel confident their work is fairly measured, you can deploy a productivity gauge to give radiologists immediate feedback on their contribution.
It’s important to have workflows in place for operations teams to support the radiologist. Radiologists need to know that they can request support and that nothing slips through the cracks. These responsibilities often fall to a radiology support team. To help the support team, they will need:
There is a variety of business metrics that are critical to your success. Leadership teams should have easy access to this data, including:
Other reports might help identify areas of breakdown
