Interrupting radiologists does not hurt their accuracy, but it affects them in other negative ways

Interruptions don’t impact an on-call radiologist’s accuracy, according to a March 20 study in the Journal of Medical Imaging, but they can increase time spent on each case. 

“In radiology, there is a growing recognition that interruptions are bad and the number of interruptions faced by radiologists is increasing,” lead author Trafton Drew, PhD, an assistant professor of cognitive and neural science at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, said in a prepared statement. “But there isn't much research at all on the consequences of this situation.”

The authors tasked radiologists with reading a “list of pre-selected, complex cases” before interrupting them with a phone call about a different patient’s case. The phone calls did not change the radiologists’ error rate, which surprised the authors, but it did take more time for them to complete the cases they were reading when the interruption took place. Eye-tracking software also revealed that the radiologists spent more time looking at a dictation screen after the interruption.

“Given that radiologists spend about 10 minutes on a complex case, we think this could be a big problem in the aggregate,” Drew said in the statement. “They can go back to what they were doing but there is a significant cost there in terms of time. If we could do something to reduce the interruptions it could really help radiologists out.”

The authors indicated in their study that additional research on this topic is needed. Understanding how radiologists react to interruptions could lead to significanty improvements in reading rooms.

“Ultimately, if we can identify factors that are particularly important in determining whether a given interruption will lead to adverse results, we may be able to use this research to design future reading room protocols that make these types of interruptions less frequent and/or less disruptive,” Drew et al. wrote.