Can the editing process of residents' preliminary reports be improved?

It's no surprise that when attending radiologists take time to review and edit preliminary reports prepared by residents, their own productivity declines. Analyzing patterns of editing in an academic radiology department may help better manage this process.

Radiologists at Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals have the freedom to choose how much to edit residents' reports. But the patterns of attending radiologists doing so had not been documented until Dr. Richard Sharpe Jr. and colleagues undertook this study.

They analyzed preliminary and final neuroradiology report pairs and anonymized attending radiologist identifiers for 15,659 examinations performed for about a six-month period in 2011. Each attending radiologist interpreted between 17 and 20 exams per clinical day.

There were distinct trends: Attending radiologists who interpreted a large number of cases made fewer edits, and those who interpreted fewer cases made more edits. What does this mean for the department, how does it affect workflow, and what should be done with this information? Attend this scientific session to find out.