Educating patients about radiology services—with YouTube?

Patients' perceptions have never been more important to radiology than in the year 2016. Radiologists are being asked to define and demonstrate their value, and a significant part of that is educating patients about medical imaging and the role radiologists play. According to a recent study published by the Journal of the American College of Radiology, educational videos about medical imaging uploaded to YouTube are a potentially valuable patient resource.

Lead author Andrew B. Rosenkrantz, MD, MPA, department of radiology at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York, and colleagues analyzed the content of more than 60 popular YouTube videos found by using terms such as “CT scan,” “MRI,” “ultrasound patient,” “PET scan” and “mammogram.”

The researchers found that all of the videos showed a patient undergoing an examination, giving patients a clear example of what they may be experiencing themselves in the near future. In addition, more than 69 percent of the videos mentioned the length of the exam, more than 65 percent mentioned potential discomfort and more than 41 percent mentioned potential radiation.  

Rosenkrantz et al. noted that one way the videos could be greatly improved would be for the presence and role of the radiologist to be more of an emphasis. For example, 84 percent of the videos showed a technologist, but the number that showed a radiologist was more than 20 percent. A radiology report was mentioned in 36.5 percent of the videos, and a radiologist’s role in interpreting images was included in just 27 percent of the videos.

“The identified gaps provide salient aspects for continued improvement of such videos,” the authors wrote. “If the improvements are made, then YouTube could provide a powerful opportunity for further educating the public regarding the central role of radiologists in the performance, interpretation, and quality assurance of imaging examinations, given the high exposure and visibility of the more frequently visited videos.”

Overall, the authors concluded that these videos give the medical imaging industry a powerful tool for improving a patient’s knowledge about radiology as a whole and the specifics of different procedures.

“These easily accessible shared videos allow individual radiology practices to avoid the time, expense, and other resources involved in developing high-quality videos regarding a range of imaging examinations for their own patients, an especially important benefit for smaller radiology practices that may lack such resources,” the authors wrote.

Rosenkrantz and colleagues did mention some limitations of their research. For instance, there are video-sharing sites besides YouTube, and those were not analyzed. Also, patients' reactions to videos were not a focus, though that information was available if one studied the various comment sections.

They also explained why videos recorded by patients were not considered for this study.

“Although these are possibly an additional rich source of insights regarding the patient experience, we deemed such videos to be of a fundamentally different nature in comparison with the scope of this study,” the authors wrote.