Dear Digital X-Ray Insider,
The vast majority of imaging sites that have converted to digital x-ray would never dream of going back to analog. But while digital x-ray delivers many benefits, such as bringing radiography into the PACS environment, it can also create new problems.
Perhaps the most significant of these is dose creep -- the phenomenon in which x-ray dose begins rising following the implementation of technologies like digital radiography (DR) and computed radiography (CR). We've discussed strategies for dealing with dose creep at length in these pages, but with this issue of the Digital X-Ray Insider we'll present the case of Harborview Medical Center, a Seattle-based hospital that developed a novel strategy for stopping dose creep in its tracks.
Harborview decided the best way to deal with the problem was to track S-numbers, the values used by the hospital's CR vendor to measure relative exposure intensity. It would be too cumbersome to manually track S-numbers for all of the facility's CR units, so the facility developed an application to mine this data from its PACS network.
Not only did the application work, but Harborview has implemented a complete quality assurance (QA) program to put the data to good use. The facility tracks S-numbers on a monthly basis, producing dashboards that radiologic technologists can use to study radiation exposure both by examination type and individual CR unit.
Find out how they did it by reading this issue's Digital X-Ray Insider Exclusive, which you can reach by clicking here.
In other news in the Digital X-Ray Community, we discuss the importance of DICOM conformance at digital x-ray QA workstations. Many imaging facilities put a lot of thought into the specifications that go into their diagnostic review displays, but may not think about what's under the hood of their QA monitors. Find out why they should by clicking here.
And finally, we examine a case study in which a Pennsylvania health network installed DR in its emergency department. Learn from their experiences by clicking here.
