Probably not. But some interesting lines from Gina Kolata’s article in the NYTimes:
Dr. Christopher Beaulieu, chief of musculoskeletal imaging at Stanford:
At that point the radiologist may be capable of transmitting the information but the obvious next question for the patient is, ‘What do I do now?’ which, as nontreating physicians, radiologists are not trained to answer.”
This issue here is not that radiologists aren’t “trained” in what happens next (in many cases, of course they are!)—it’s that radiologists don’t actually do what happens next. If you aren’t going to provide treatment, you probably don’t need to be offering patients their options, particularly if you aren’t privy to their history.
For now — with one big exception — how quickly a patient gets the results of a scan, including M.R.I.s, PETs, CTs or ultrasounds, can be idiosyncratic and depend on the particular doctor and the particular patient.
Yet patients want to hear from radiologists, the groups say. One admittedly unscientific indicator was patients’ comments to the American College of Radiology on Twitter. They said they did not want to wait for results and could not understand why a radiologist would tell a doctor their results but not them, said Dr. Geraldine McGinty, chairwoman of the group’s commission on economics.
Realistically, patients want their results quickly and probably don’t care who tells them. The main issue here is patient scheduling. It’s not fair to patients to have an MRI one day and then have an appointment with the ordering provider two weeks later. Many physician schedules are fully booked with routine follow-ups, leaving no room for add-ons when unexpected scan results come up. In some thoughtfully scheduled clinics, patients have a scan in the morning and are seen that afternoon. That’s ideal.
If a patient then still wanted to speak to a radiologist (leaving aside the issue of the non-reimbursable time spent), I think both the radiologists and the referring clinicians would be much happier having that happen in a context in which the definitive management discussion would happen immediately afterward and not in some yet-to-be-determined future appointment. If the patient finds out before the referring provider, then the system breaks down. And learning you have cancer only to be told you won’t be seen by the oncologist until three weeks later is also not therapeutic. We need to be more thoughtful in how patients are scheduled for follow-up—that’s the crux.
“The chance of your actually seeing a radiologist is almost zero,” said Steve Burrin, a physicist and retired vice president of The Aerospace Corporation. Mr. Burrin, 70, who has lung cancer and lives in Los Angeles, has so many scans — CT, M.R.I., PET — that he decided to take matters into his own hands. Now, he immediately asks for a copy of his scan and tries to understand it himself.
I do though think the current state of patient accessible information is problematic. More and more patients have access to their raw reports, which are written for a physician reader.1 The information, terminology, and certain turns of phrase can be bewildering and frankly misleading to patients. If a patient report states there several “indeterminate renal hypodense lesions” which are “too small to characterize,” that sounds super mysterious. But they’re really just (essentially always) tiny cysts of no clinical consequence.
If the future is centered on more transparency and patient empowerment, it would probably be better if a patient-centered report was incorporated into the medical record with the salient points written in accessible language. This is similar to the approach used by WebMD and Medscape, which are owned by the same company, where there are pages on the same topic with one set of data shown to patients and another set to physicians.