Week 6: Rolling in the Deep

This week has been very distinguishable from my previous weeks in the Clinical Immersion Term.  I have delved deep in working on a few projects in different branches of Radiology and it has helped me to see the patient improvement aspect of medical practices.  Due to patient satisfaction report comments as well as improvement of patient waiting room experience, I am helping with a project that is implementing a tablet application for communication, education, and minimizing patient privacy issues or mis-identification.  My contributions have been nostalgic in bringing back memories of observational design courses that I took at Georgia Tech.  It has been nice re-visiting doing actual observations of patients, understanding the user need, solutions and limitations of the future implemented technology, and formulating a plan of the workflow of the implementation.  Working alongside a Masters of Health Administrative student, Jae Mo Chang, as well as the IT team, we are preparing a PowerPoint presentation to summarize all of our findings as well as a demonstration of the application for the marketing team this upcoming week.  I am looking forward to the feedback that we will receive as well as see how my added contributions will tangibly impact patient waiting room experience.

The other project that I am involved in will primarily focus on the recall rate of breast imaging patients who undergo screening and have lack of prior comparison films.  Due to this, patients receive a Breast Imaging-Reporting and Data System Score of 0, which may require additional tests because the radiologist does not have anything to compare to the current films.  This not only affects the recall rate percentage, but also the patient emotionally.  The goal of this project is to ultimately find out if the recall rate is due to lack of comparison films or an actual change when the comparison films are available.  If significance is found, then further considerations on educating patients as well as physicians on the importance of prior films for comparison can be explored as well as a reduction of unnecessary recall rate and false positives for medical practices.  I am really interested in this project personally because I have observed many cases that have lacked prior comparison films at the Breast Imaging Center and it has a significant impact on reading as well as practice workflow with additional testing of patients without knowing whether there is a true abnormal finding or a stable, benign finding which can be deciphered with prior films for comparison.

As my time in the city is starting to wind down, there are tourist things that I have not yet experienced.  I have come to accept that if I don't do it this time around, then it only gives me an excuse to come back :)