3 key takeaways from David C. Kushner’s ACR presidential address

David C. Kushner, MD, served as the 2015-2016 president of the American College of Radiology, and his 2016 presidential address about patient- and family-centered care has now been published by the Journal of the American College of Radiology.

These are three key takeaways from his presentation:

1. Radiologists must work toward reversing modern healthcare trends

Kushner presented numerous facts about the current health of Americans. For example, smoking, obesity and other behavioral issues are responsible for as many as 40 percent of deaths in this country. And approximately 90 million adults “lack basic health literacy.”

These facts, Kushner said, can’t be ignored by the medical imaging community. And if you plan on sitting on your hands and doing nothing, you should rethink that strategy.

“You should make the transition from being part of the problem to becoming part of the solution,” he said. “I will state the obvious for the record: It will take more than just radiologists to improve these dismal public health figures. But that is actually the point. We must join the rest of medicine to influence the issues, and we must begin now.”

2. Radiologists must define and demonstrate their own value

The shift from quantity to quality means quality metrics will be defining future reimbursements. If radiologists aren’t active during this change, Kushner explained, then they are putting their careers into someone else’s hands.

“I believe that a successful department or practice will be one that participates in the change,” he said.

Kushner went on to provide examples of how patient- and family-centered care is being embraced by both entire radiology groups and departments and by individual radiologists.

Radiology groups and departments, he said, are now including patients in “design, planning and evaluation processes,” and more attention is being paid to the health literacy of patients.

Individual radiologists, meanwhile, are working hard to be more accessible to their patients instead of locked away in a reading room during the entire workday.

“Radiologists are making clinical rounds to consult with patients at the bedside, as appropriate, and as members of the care team,” Kushner said. “Radiologists are making themselves available to patients by appointment to discuss results directly with patients. We must remember that imaging is often poorly explained and poorly understood.”

3. Patient- and family-centered care is ‘the right thing to do’

Radiologists, like other physicians, will now have reimbursements tied to whether their patients receive the care they need and actually get better—but Kushner is quick to point out that this change is about much more than just getting paid.

“Humbly, I would suggest that we need to be interested in patient- and family-centered care because it is the right thing to do, because it is good medicine, because it is good business, because it will soon be a component of our reimbursement, and, perhaps most important of all, because, someday, each of us or a loved one will be a patient,” he said.