Business analytics help radiology department boost CT use for fragile patients despite COVID disruptions
Business analytics software helped one academic radiology department to increase CT use among vulnerable populations, despite ongoing interruptions stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Total imaging volumes fell by 21.5% at the Sant’Andrea University Hospital in Rome, Italy, in 2020 compared to the same period the previous year. And radiologists’ workloads also plummeted by nearly 25%, experts wrote Tuesday in European Radiology.
However, management decisions supported by business analytics software maintained efficiency in the ED and preserved care for cancer patients. During the same period, CT among outpatients increased by nearly 12% without severely impact emergency radiologists’ turnaround times and workloads.
“Business analytics software is an extremely powerful tool that provides a precise insight of real-time changing scenarios,” Andrea Laghi, a professor of radiology with Sapienza University of Rome, and co-authors concluded. “When applied to our radiology unit, it allowed us to reinforce managerial decisions and to support the changes in workforce planning during pandemic crisis, in which the main hospital goals were management of emergencies and the guarantee of continuity of care, especially for oncologic and fragile patients.”
For the study, Italian imaging experts retrospectively analyzed data from their medium-sized academic hospital, which includes 452 beds and 523 physicians. Early in the pandemic, the institution designated separate diagnostic pathways for patients with and without COVID-19. However, Laghi et al. witnessed a roughly 41% drop in outpatient exams, with the progressive reduction also impacting fragile and oncologic patients.
Based on early data, the team switched back to a standard pathway by the time the second wave arrived. Emergency radiology workloads had decreased and become less complex, including a threefold increase in chest CT use coupled with a 70% drop in brain CT and 65% decrease in abdominal-pelvic CT. Pivoting to a single pathway improved the numbers, as emergency rads’ workloads increased 16% compared to the first wave.
“We established stringent internal CT protocols, allowing scans of COVID-19 patients consecutively and safely while sanitizing the CT scanner room at the end of the shift and not after each single CT examination,” the authors advised. “The risk of a simultaneous urgent case was balanced by the availability of a second backup CT in the main department, whose use did not affect the overall CT productivity,” they added later.
Read more about their work in the European Radiology (open access).
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.