“You can have the best scanner in the world, but if there is no report, it is worthless”

In a recent interview with AuntMinnie Radiology magazine, Dr. Giles Boland, medical director of teleradiology and vice chairman of radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston, talks about the pressure Radiologists are facing when it comes to documentation.
The article starts off with a rather capitalistic - although realisitic- view of the 21st century reading room: “radiologists today are measured constantly, whether it is in the number of images they read, their relative value unit (RVU) activity, or their report turnaround times.” Not only that. ”You can get three different radiologists to look at the same scan and they can give very different lengths and styles of interpretations,” Boland continues. “How is a referring physician to navigate through those variable styles?”
"The advantage of voice recognition is that it may be counterintuitive because if radiologists have to edit that report, they naturally will shorten the number of words they put in it. They don’t want to edit a report that is five pages long." [click heading for more]