RSNA 2013 - RC126 - Health IT tools to Improve quality and safety in radiology

A crucial point in quality metrics is the choice of the right measures. These measures should be selected such that they can be used to identify problems, not making the department look good. Metrics that are repeatedly in range should be droppen since they are not providing information to improven. The national quality forum can help to identify the radiology measures for quality. However they only include 2 dedicated radiology metrics.

Employee engagement is very important to succesfully improve quality. An example was given showing that metrics were used to stimulate radiologists to meet them by connecting the number of metrics met to a financial reward. This worked remarkably showing a much better quality performance after this reward was implemented.

Another vital part of quality improvement is root cause analysis. Just recording problems and fixing them does not improve quality, taking the time to get to the root cause and solving it does.