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The Meaningful Peer Review in Radiology
What Is Peer Review?
Peer review is a continuous, systematic, and critical reflection and evaluation of physician performance using structured procedures. Peer review is an evaluation by a colleague, who could be of the same or a different discipline working in a practice or hospital unit.
Why Peer Review?
Quality gaps exist in all medical specialties, including radiology. Mistakes in radiology are common at a rate comparable with other medical errors. It is crucial for the radiology community to find ways to mitigate and prevent errors that potentially cause harmful health outcomes. Radiologists have the privilege of self-governance, with the responsibility of mutual accountability for quality. Thus, it is our obligation to ensure ourselves of optimal competency.
How to Perform Peer Review
Most institutions have at least one method of peer review, not limited to retrospective medical record review. The systems are commonly conducted in committees, and important decisions are made by committee consensus.
What to Measure
The ideal measures should be evidence-based and agreed-on standards that are easily reproducible and represent good attributes for the individual radiologist’s work. In addition, measurement needs to occur in sufficient numbers to allow a meaningful statistical evaluation.
How to Measure
There are several methods to assess radiologists’ technical performance. The most commonly used and fundamental to peer review is case review. Case review is a professional review of submitted cases found to contain potential errors detected by radiologist peers, colleagues, or other medical professionals. Case review is a reactive process because performance is assessed and documented only when a discrepancy arises and is reported. Proactive review, on the other hand, is different in that the review occurs in a blinded manner. The cases are randomly assigned for double interpretation or assessment of agreement by separate radiologists.
This technique is used in the iCode Peer Review system to assess interpretive agreement of prior imaging studies. iCode Peer Review is a vendor neutral solution enhances the radiology reporting quality and facilitate improved quality of patient care. The solution complies with ACR peer review standards (score cards 2009 and 2016 editions).
Peer review is performed during the routine interpretation of current images by evaluating prior studies and interpretation. The current reviewing radiologist assigns a score based on a standardized 4-point rating scale regarding the level of quality concerns to the prior interpretation performed by the original interpreting radiologist. It is the solution to meet the fourth requirement for maintenance of certification, which is evaluation of performance in practice.
For more more information about iCode Peer Review, please visit below page:
www.rosenfieldhealth/peer-review
Source: https://www.ajronline.org/doi/full/10.2214/AJR.11.8143
