Highly disruptive: Interruptions cause radiologists to lose focus in reading room

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Reading room interruptions often cause radiologists to completely disengage from the case at hand, wasting the radiologists’ time and potentially delaying care, according to a recent study published by the Journal of the American College of Radiology.

Raj M. Ratwani, PhD, MedStar Health National Center for Human Factors in Healthcare in Washington, DC, and colleagues closely watched 13 radiologists for 90 minutes at a time, using a web-based application to track each and every time they were interrupted. The radiologists came from four different subspecialties—abdominal, musculoskeletal/breast, nuclear medicine, and neuroradiology—and they knew they were being observed.

Overall, the radiologists experienced a total of 94 interruptions in more than 1,000 minutes of observation. The mean length of each interruption was 2.4 minutes.

Sixty four percent of the interruptions were “in person,” coming from radiology residents, other attending radiologists, other physicians, and technical support. The other 36 percent were from phone calls, pagers, and other devices.

Also, the authors said more than 10 percent of the interruptions had little or nothing to do with radiology. Examples provided were casual conversations and “computer-related technical interruptions.”

“The observations revealed that the characteristics of interruptions in reading rooms are highly disruptive,” the authors wrote. “Interruptions lasted well over 2 min, which is likely to result in substantial memory decay; many interruptions occurred during case reads and were unrelated to the cases being read; and the majority of interruptions required radiologists to completely disengage from the cases being read.”

Ratwani et al. noted that the number of interruptions radiologists face on a daily basis could increase due to consultations with other physicians and patients becoming more common.

“It will be important to develop methods to reduce the disruptiveness of interruptions by developing technologies that provide clear environmental cues to help radiologists resume after interruptions and providing radiologists with cognitive strategies to facilitate task resumption,” the authors wrote. “In addition, the content of interruptions should be examined to reduce nonessential interruptions.”