A group of radiologists believe it may be time to rethink the specialty’s involvement in multidisciplinary team meetings, and they have data to back up their claim.
Six subspecialized physicians documented their contributions to these meetings over the course of two years at a single tertiary care center. Their work included interpreting and reporting on all related scans prior to gathering. Investigators also calculated the instances in which a radiologist’s recommendations resulted in patient management changes, beyond the information already provided by an in-house radiology report.
Bottom line: It’s not worth the trouble, Dr. Ömer Kasalak and colleagues wrote Friday in European Radiology [1].
“Radiologists’ time investment in [multidisciplinary team meetings] is considerable relative to the small proportion of cases in which they influence patient management in the MDTM. The use of radiologists for MDTMs should therefore be improved.” the authors, with the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands, concluded.
The study spanned a total of 68 meetings. On average, radiologists spent about 11,000 minutes preparing and attending, which excludes imaging exams that had not been reported yet. That equated to a median of about 172 minutes per MDTM and a median of 9 minutes per patient. Radiologists’ input only changed patient management in 113 out of 1,138 cases or about 8.4% of the time.
“On a personal note, the authors believe that participation of radiologists in MDTMs can absolutely be beneficial to patient care,” Kasalak and colleagues wrote. “However, radiologists face increasing workload demands, and burnout is prevalent in the specialty, with self-reported burnout in approximately 1 out of 3 radiologists in recent survey studies. The participation of radiologists in MDTMs should therefore be optimized.”
For instance, treating physicians could select only those cases for preparation by the radiologist in which the in-house report is deemed incomplete or not sufficiently clear. Kasalak and co-authors also suggested that teams should build consensus about the objectives they want radiologists to achieve through these meetings, “in relation to the growing number of other tasks that they must also fulfill.”
Read much more, including potential study limitations, at the link below.
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.