Time to air audits of our CT service.
by EWL
We live in a consumer society and increasingly we and our patients are no longer happy to be sent to whichever specialist service their GP thinks best, so we go online to find data and information that influences our choices.
When it comes to having a CT scan however, people are generally disappointed about how little ‘quality data’ are out there- some reviews of experiences are available, true, yet when it comes to finding some ‘hard data’- such as: is the scanner service using modern scanning equipment; with low radiation doses and high diagnostic rates; just how many specialist scans do they do; what are the outcomes; there isn’t much to go on, yet clinicians who have trained in these areas know these are indeed the metrics that matter most when it comes to judging quality of service, and more importantly, who they would expect to be sent to themselves, or send their family to, for a cardiac CT scan.
At VCL HeartscanDirect we simply want to be the best, and in order to prove it, we collect data, lots of it- in fact we collect over 200 variables for every scan that we undertake. We invested in a huge database and review all of our data in quarterly medical advisory committees and radiation protection meetings, to ensure that our service remains ‘cutting edge’ and that we are providing the very best diagnostic service at the lowest possible radiation dose.
We offer our followers a glimpse of this information from the multiple excerpts of screenshots below taken from the latest of these meetings – publishing our doses, protocols and outcomes, along with our patient reviews for everyone to see.
The next challenge will be to see who else will publish their results.
These data will be published via blog articles annually.
How many scans do we do, and how many of these were sophisticated coronary angiograms?
How many one stop scans – where a patient had a scan and consultation in one visit?
How many scans were done with good heart rate control and using lowest dose with a prospective scan protocol?
What dose of radiation?
What about the CTDI metric (a new standard)?
How successful were we in producing a diagnostic scan? (all CTCAs by Reader opinion)
What type of protocol did we use?
How long did the scan take to book, perform and report?
Our teams were quick to contact each patient once referred.
Once referred , most patient were scanned within a week.
Although we report critical disease on the day, we noticed the final report is taking longer to dispatch so we have developed a faster reporting system to shorten the time to final report dispatch.
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