Radiology Future Outlook

[afan]

tele enables more efficiency in that you only need a IR/mammo for boots on ground. Before I envision lots of rads in BFE(in aggregate) who frankly weren’t busy. There is no need for that in future when you have a bunch of tele guys/gals running really fast on their mouse wheel cranking through tons of studies.

the cases still need to be read but that is easily absorbed by large tele networks instead of having a rad sit around in BFE who is frankly doing like 0.5 FTE workload.

What is BFE?

Whatever it is, right now it is hard to find radiologists with no work to do. Telerad practices are picking up all the work they can get but they cannot find enough radiologists to cover. Many groups that would like to hire telerad find that no one has capacity to take them on.

In theory, one could imagine a slow site with a radiologist hanging around in case they were needed.

In reality you don't staff positions like that. One way or another consolidate so the most expensive cog in the system, the radiologist, is pounding away at full speed all the time. Practices have been doing this for years. If you have a slow outpatient office that requires a radiologist onsite, have them pull cases from the list that were done elsewhere. By no means would you have anyone sitting around twiddling their thumbs. If a site only generated enough work for a half time FTE, then put someone there for half the day. Or close the site.