Battling the radiology backlog - Veterinary Practice News
On a particularly hectic day when there isn't enough time to get everything done, don't you sometimes wish that you could clone yourself? Or when vets are overcrowded with cases, do you want to clone them?
Veterinary radiology is a specialty that has always lagged behind. According to the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA), the demand for advanced distance radiology is outpacing the supply of licensed radiologists, and this trend is expected to continue for the next several years. Experts predict a 300 percent increase in teleradiology case numbers, which will overwhelm the current number of specialists. A 2018 study forecast that 66 percent of cases in North American teleradiology will not be covered by the end of 2022.1
Cloning may not be available today, but artificial intelligence (AI) is. Effective use in veterinary radiology can make both radiologists and veterinarians more efficient and improve patient care and practice revenue.
How did the industry get to a place where the number of radiologists far outweighs the number of specialists available? The answer is the lack of radiology departments and current standards of care.
The number of veterinary schools without radiology departments is increasing, leading to more veterinary graduates who are less trained in interpreting X-rays. Schools without radiology programs, and even some with ones, send their X-rays to specialists for review. Graduated veterinarians learn to do the same thing. This increases the teleradiology drop load.
That wouldn't be a problem if there were numerous state-certified radiologists, but unfortunately not. Today there are fewer than 35 veterinary radiology programs in the United States, with between 30 and 40 specialists graduate each year.
Different standards of care also play a role in the imbalance between cases and specialists. Some veterinarians are comfortable reading x-rays and only sending complex cases to specialists. Others believe that DVMs shouldn't interpret x-rays, but focus on core competencies and leave x-ray reading to specialists. In recent years, the number of daily / weekly / monthly X-rays taken and sent has increased thanks to cheaper technology and easy X-ray transmission. As a result, there aren't enough specialists to handle the load.
The trend for many large corporate groups, as well as emergency and specialty hospitals, is for radiologists to go on board to skip over any x-ray images taken to more closely follow human medical procedures. Unfortunately, processing times are getting longer as we continue to create more x-rays than professionals can read. Diagnoses, treatments or further tests are also delayed, which ultimately affects the health of our patients. Interestingly, fast turnaround time has become the new currency in radiology services as it is not uncommon for turnaround time without a STAT to reach 15 days or more.
Sending x-rays to specialists also increases the cost of pet owners. While this cost is justified, especially when a specialist reading is critical to understanding a unique or complex case, it sometimes means that the more money customers spend on specific x-rays, the less time they have for follow-up treatment or future visits. Not only does this affect the health of the pet, it also affects the veterinarian's income and profitability.
One solution is to increase the number of radiology programs in the US to train and certify more specialists. However, implementation takes time and will not help the industry for now or even in the short term.
A more immediate solution would be to use AI to automate routine radiological readings in the workflow, saving the more difficult cases for the limited supply of specialists.
Nowadays, the AI technology can be linked to your software so that all uploaded x-ray images can be automatically scanned and evaluated. Results are ...
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