How education can bring significant results to your medical imaging department

In recent years, medical imaging has undergone numerous changes: some have had a disruptive impact on the way we work, while others were merely a consequence of a natural evolution. According to studies we have recently conducted, the main challenges to be faced in post-Covid times are the following:?

- Growing demand for imaging services, both inside and outside hospitals?

- The presence of unintegrated and isolated data?

- A growing and worrying global shortage of radiologists, technicians, and service staff/department staff?

In our analysis, we will briefly address these three points and see how new applications in IT are playing a key role in addressing these challenges.?

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A GROWING DEMAND FOR IMAGING SERVICES?

It is now clear for everyone that demand for imaging studies is growing, especially with regard to the early detection of chronic diseases. This growth is related to an increasingly aging population. In fact, according to the World Health Organization, between 2015 and 2050, the percentage of the world's population aged over 60 will almost double, rising from 12% to 22%. On the other hand, increased awareness of the importance of early detection also plays a role in this growth. The demand for more medical imaging studies in its various modalities increases together with awareness of the need for an early diagnosis. In addition, modern technologies are enhancing medical imaging, turning it into the main diagnosis hub.??

INTEGRATED SYSTEMS?

New modalities provide increasing amounts of data (for instance, in the form of images) and this data must be processed, archived, analyzed, and reviewed. Radiology data mostly consists of images, and any region has had data retention requirements in place for years. Radiologists also need to have increasingly intelligent systems at hand in order to evaluate large data amounts and integrate data items/elements with each other, so as to provide longitudinal insights. This, in turn, will help make faster, more impactful/effective decisions.?

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THE SHORTAGE OF STAFF?

One thing is for certain: in the coming years, radiologists will play an increasing role in modern medicine. While the volume of studies and of data is expected to grow, supported by continuous improvements in medical imaging applications, one key challenge remains: staff shortages. Such shortages actually seem to set a double challenge for radiology departments:?

1. The first is that one must cope with an increased workload and must constantly achieve a certain level of productivity. Lately, this discrepancy between the workload and the limited number of available radiologists has led to several cases of burnout.?

2. The second challenge is closely linked to the loss of knowledge in radiology departments. In fact, while a progressive generational turnover is taking place for physiological reasons on the one hand, limited staff availability, on the other hand, causes staff to prioritize all activities deemed urgent, to the detriment of training. This is even more true when the healthcare organization has no established or structured knowledge systems, making knowledge exchange a complicated process – hence leading to a decline in radiology departments’ knowledge.?

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KNOWLEDGE: A KEY ELEMENT IN MEETING FUTURE MEDICAL IMAGING CHALLENGES.?

Radiologists around the world are adopting medical imaging technologies which will transform the pace and standard of healthcare. After the COVID-19 pandemic, which worsened issues such as radiologist shortages and led to higher burnout rates and an increased use of medical imaging services, the need for medical imaging IT technologies to be easily deployable and efficient, and strictly linked to consolidation and knowledge transfer, has emerged as a significant issue. In most radiology departments, knowledge appears to be fragmented and actually comes in different ways. This knowledge can be explicitly available, for instance in documented cases, but can also be implicit, for instance as personal knowledge based on studies and experience. The wide range of available formats make this situation even more complex – knowledge may be digital, but educational files in more traditional film and light-box formats, which may suffer damage over time, also remain in use to this day. In addition to the issue of fragmented knowledge, radiologists have less time due to a heavy workload, which means they sacrifice time which they should be dedicating to learning and transferring knowledge to younger generations. What matters for us here is to provide tools for transferring and consolidating knowledge within the radiology department, the ultimate aim being to achieve qualitatively higher medical results and more accurate diagnoses, thanks to reference content concerning similar cases. If radiology department experts can access more knowledge, their productivity will also increase, and they will be able to handle the diagnostic workflow more efficiently.?

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THE ROLE OF TEACHING FILE ARCHIVES?

Radiology teaching relies heavily on exposure to the wide range of abnormal cases among those treated by different specialists. Unfortunately, these "abnormal" cases are usually hidden in an equally significant number of normal studies. Face-to-face teaching, using teaching files, conveys meaningful information about interpreting the subtle differences between what is normal or abnormal, what is actually a given pathology and what may seem to be but actually is not, and also shows how to tell the difference between different diseases and pathologies. As such, teaching files play a key role, and are increasingly seen as valuable knowledge transfer tools in radiology and other imaging domains. Experts usually keep these files for reference or to help them with a diagnosis. They may also share them with colleagues, for instance during a training course or in a scientific publication, and they actually most often present these files before specialist committees such as Tumor boards. It is a known fact that many organizations do not have a reliable teaching file management system, due to a lack of time or to inefficient IT systems. We have therefore precisely focused on designing IT systems which can be integrated into a PACS, are easy to use, and can be a valuable complementary, asynchronous knowledge transfer tool. DeepUnity Educational Archive has precisely been designed for the purpose of consolidating and transferring knowledge, to ultimately increase the efficiency and the quality of radiology workflow processes.?