Some notable names are among 22 sites joining the American College of Radiology’s new quality initiative to improve cancer diagnostics, announced Thursday.
Those include Radiology Partners, Solis Mammography, Cleveland Clinic, Stanford Health Care and Intermountain, among others. ACR has secured a more than $3 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation to fuel the work. Efforts will focus on imaging pain points such as improving lung cancer screening, mammography positioning, prostate MRI scan quality, and recommendations for follow-up.
“The excitement of the team members to get started is palpable across the facilities,” ACR Executive VP Mythreyi Chatfield, PhD, co-director of the Learning Network program, said in a statement. “There’s a lot of enthusiasm about engaging in a new approach to improving diagnostic performance both within the local teams and to develop generalizable knowledge to share across teams.”
Providers from across the country showed strong interest in this first around, submitting almost 200 applications. ACR said it conducted a “rigorous” process to whittle the list down, with four to six facilities participating in each cohort. For those who didn’t make the cut, the college will begin accepting applications for the same four learning collaboratives this upcoming fall.
Those involved in this iteration will use a “learning health system approach,” working together to solve the same issue using a “structured improvement process” customized to their own institution. Four physicians in academia will lead the collaboratives: the University of Kansas’ Neville Irani (lung); Stanford’s Sarah Pittman (mammo); Andrei Purysko at the Cleveland Clinic (prostate); and Ben Wandtke with the University of Rochester (incidental findings). ACR said it plans to broadly disseminate the findings to the field.
Addison, Texas-based Solis Mammography, one of the nation’s largest independent providers of breast screening services, is taking part in the mammo collaborative. They note that substandard positioning of patients is the primary cause of inadequate images and potential cancer misses.
“We want to catch every cancer we can, including tomorrow’s cancer today,”
CMO Chirag Parghi, MD, said in a separate statement. “This mission aligns perfectly with the American College of Radiology in designing this collaborative. We are obsessed with process improvement and are eager to partner with academic and medical institutions committed to advancing mammography.”
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.