Radiology after 5: Improvement in the Exercise of Emergency Radiology

Currently, the emergency radiology practiced around the world plays an important role in the number of studies performed each year in radiology departments. Most of them are performed outside of normal working hours (i. e,. during night shifts), initially interpreted by fellows and residents that are on duty, and subsequently reviewed by the attendant in charge of the shift or the corresponding section the following morning or remotely. However, the greatest number of interpretation errors occur during these hours, which result in inadequate management and causes delays for patients in the emergency room. This is why the use of strategies to quantify the percentage of error in these studies has become very important, not only to provide statistics for individual departments, but also to formulate strategies to allow errors to be identified and diminished to improve patient care. The American College of Radiology (ACR) has created a scoring system for these non-concordant findings and has provided guidelines for admissible error percentages. We conducted a retrospective, observational and descriptive study, in which we evaluated the percentage of non-concordances in the emergency studies in the Diagnostic Imaging Department. We describe the results obtained over a period of 15 months and describe the strategy that we implemented to analyze, socialize, and improve these results.