We’re Hiring

07.27.25 // Radiology

Time for my annual update and bump of this post: like every other practice in the country, my group is also hiring!

American Radiology Associates is a 100%-independent physician-owned radiology practice in Dallas-Forth Worth (of which I am a partner/shareholder). We’re privademic: we have part of the practice that works with the Baylor Dallas radiology residency, and we have part of the practice that does not. I’m the program director, and I still enjoy a nice mix. Just imagine the fun no-BS parts of teaching and variety without the rigid hierarchy and inflexibility.

We’re hiring for body, general, neuro, NM/PET, and breast. All of us in DFW work a hybrid on-site/remote schedule and the option of a 4-day workweek. We are also hiring teleradiologists for body/general imaging.

While our partners are generally in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex, we are also offering a 100%-remote partnership-eligible swing position.

The swing shift is 2 pm-10 pm Central Time, weekdays (M-F) alternating every other week + 13 weekends of call (yes that means mostly weekdays and not 7/7 (which is 26 weekends), and never any deep nights or super weird circadian-destroying hours). The shifts are a mixture of early outpatient and subsequent general (body + neuro) ED/inpatient work for our regional/community hospitals. Other schedule configurations could be considered on an employee or 1099 basis.

So if you’re in the market, come work with me and check out our great team in Dallas. If you’re interested, send your CV to careers@americanrad.com and CC me at ben.white@americanrad.com.

Radiology Ergonomics and Productivity

07.26.25 // Radiology

Here is the updated collection of my posts on radiology setups/hardware, ergonomics, and productivity:

1. The Best Radiology Setup/Workstation Equipment

Here’s what I have idiosyncratically landed on as a stable happy set-up that balances efficiency and comfort (and an editorial selection of those favored by others).

Life is too short to use what comes with your computer.

2. How I Use the Contour Shuttle for Radiology

This post could have been titled: Why and How to Use an Offhand Device for Radiology, Or maybe even: How to Make the Most of All Those Extra Buttons on Your Gaming Mouse or Similar Device

More buttons! Better scrolling! Save your wrist! Feel like a PACS ninja!

3. AutoHotkey for Radiology

AutoHotkey is powerful free software you can use to control your computer and generate simple (or complex) macros to automate tedious or repetitive tasks.

Achieve frictionless hands-free dictation (and more!)
If you need more scrolling help, consider Autoscrolling with Autohotkey.

4. Making the Most of PowerScribe

PowerScribe is ubiquitous in radiology practices across the country, and it’s the only dictation software I use in my job. It has many flaws, but there are plenty of things we can do to make the most of it…Here are some tips for making PowerScribe (360) suck less.

Don’t be a passive victim of bad corporate software. Read more about (totally worth it) automatic template launching here.

5. Radiology Toys (TL;DR)

For the use-with-your-hands part, here are some quick contexts and a single choice for each that you can implement wherever you work:

Quick highlights: Optimizing is a worthy investment of time/energy/money.

6. Using the Zelotes C18 for Radiology

The Zelotes is the cheapest vertical mouse that doesn’t suck, and it has enough buttons that it’s useful for everyday PACS functionality no matter where you work.

How to think about mice for radiology with a special focus on a very inexpensive “vertical mouse” (along with some alternatives).

Feel free to bookmark this post, because I’ll also add any follow-ups here.

After my rant last week that radiology software companies need to spend the resources to actually involve radiologists in product creation, I got a great email from a large company who loved the article, asking if I could review their roadmap because they would “appreciate” my “perspective and feedback on where we are heading.” They missed (or pretended to miss) the point: You may think you need a free hour of a radiologist’s time, but you’re wrong. You need a thoughtful radiologist who cares about your product to be consistently involved.

// 07.25.25

Gell-Mann Amnesia

07.24.25 // Reading

Michael Crichton (famous novelist and never-practicing MD), describing the cognitive bias of “Gell-Mann Amnesia” in a 2002 speech (as included in How Not to Invest by Barry Ritholtz):

You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the wet streets cause rain stories. Papers are full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story—and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

One of the points Crichton is making, particularly with regard to the media, is that we are more forgiving of certain institutions than we are with people in real life. When someone opines confidently but incorrectly about your area of expertise, you know they’re a blowhard. But we are generally forgiving of institutions (until we become so blinded by bullshit that we discount everything, adrift on a sea of conspiracy theories).

We do discount what are considered credible and trustworthy sources when we know they’re wrong but otherwise assume they’re generally right. It’s almost an institutional halo effect; we give more credit than due unless we are forced by our own knowledge to confront it.

In reality, the lesson is: truth is hard. People are wrong all the time, and institutions are full of people. That doesn’t mean they don’t matter—they do!—or that everyone is consistently wrong or that you should never trust anyone, but it does mean that our beloved institutions require maintenance and care.

Ritholtz:

There are tremendous advantages in recognizing what you do not know. Acknowledging shortcomings in your informational intelligence is a form of situational awareness that prevents you from being blindsided. There are other benefits as well. It shifts your focus to process over outcome; you can better understand what results come from skill versus dumb luck. It prevents you from being fooled by randomness.

We should be a little more thoughtful and a little less credulous. A little less precious with our own knowledge, acknowledging the shortcomings in what we know, where we seek information, and how we incorporate it into our latticework of mental models.

In other words: Less Certainty, More Inquiry.

“Shame is a dream killer” and 64 other helpful short notes from Seth Godin.

// 07.21.25

Strength to Strength

07.21.25 // Reading

Regarding the nature of a “good job” vs/and/or a good career, the two different types of ancient Greek “happiness” as relayed by Arthur C. Brooks in From Strength to Strength:

Hedonia is about feeling good; eudaimonia is about living a purpose-filled life. In truth, we need both. Hedonia without eudaimonia devolves into empty pleasure; eudaimonia without hedonia can become dry.

A few more of my favorite passages from that book that work well together:

Hold your success lightly—be ready to change as your abilities change. Even if your worldly prestige falls, lean into the changes.

If you base your sense of self-worth on success, you tend to go from victory to victory to avoid feeling awful…You need constant success hits just not to feel like a failure.

Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things.

Automatic Template Loading with Easy Delete

07.17.25 // Radiology

This isn’t earth-shattering stuff, but I do think it’s a tidy illustration of how a small, easy-to-make change with a relatively minimal amount of hassle can nonetheless reap a small but measurable benefit—and in the long term, meaningful time and energy savings.

I appreciate/hope that this will all be irrelevant for radiologists very soon, but while thousands of us are still using Powerscribe, this is still part of our worklife.
Read More →

Revolution or Evolution

07.14.25 // Radiology

A few weeks ago, I got to enjoy a pitch for another poorly conceived “revolutionary” radiology AI workflow and reporting tool.

Tech people: Just bring on a radiologist CMO and a couple more to work on product. Stop cheaping out. Give them stock if you can’t pay, but these mostly suck and will continue to suck.

Everyone is happy to have some radiologists as “partners” that are just customers beta testing your buggy, half-baked products for free, but not enough are using content experts to make useful software from the get-go using first principles rooted in real-world experience and expertise. I would also love to see less focus on peddling trash and more on building product.

Free advice: Maybe just build something straightforward using current capabilities that is easy to deploy integrate into current workflows that people want right now. Something that doesn’t require massive buy-in and changing your whole tech stack.

Enterprise software sucks. Build up some good will, go from there. Not everyone needs to raise a ton of money to milk the bubble of me-too “AI for X” wrappers. Make something that solves a small, specific, real pain point and enjoy a nice cash-flowing business for a few years.

Reinvest in the next product if you want—or don’t. Forget about multiple rounds of raising capital trying to build and scale a behemoth on a foundation of sand.

Now, if you really want to revolutionize everything and replace radiologists with magical AI powers, great, that’s totally fine. You may be able to skip lots of radiologist feedback (though I imagine you’d still be better off with some deeply integrated, thoughtful radiologists). Someone somewhere can revolutionize everything from farm to table, but there’s also low-hanging fruit to optimize specific parts of the workflow in the meantime. Every part of the imaging pipeline has tedious, essentially broken software tasks and inefficiencies, and in many situations, it’ll be easier to optimize them individually in the short term than try to replace everything wholesale.

In other news, if you’re a current software vendor, now is the time to improve your offerings before it’s too late.

Everyone is happy to play the enterprise software game and court big hospital systems. But no one wants to build a grassroots business working with real people doing real work—because it doesn’t scale easily and it’s hard to raise money for.

I know that getting customers is hard—but that may be because your product sucks, because of the friction involved in transitioning to an unproven solution, or because you can’t demonstrate real benefits beyond just saying “AI.”

Yes, inertia is real: your new thing needs to be way better than the incumbent or something you can plug in for a reasonable additional cost. That still leaves a lot of opportunity on the table.

Private equity radiology company US Radiology Specialists (USRS) is changing its name to Lumexa Imaging. Lumexa sounds like prescription eye drops or a new antidepressant. Or maybe an overseas manufacturer for flashlights on Amazon.

// 07.14.25

Morgan Housel, “Little Ways the World Works”:

Chamath Palihapitiya once noted that however fast your business grows, that’s the half-life for how quickly it can be destroyed. So many companies, flush with cheap money from previous years, are learning this right now. Every business and every industry has a natural growth rate – push beyond it and short-term growth comes at the cost of long-term quality, and eventually survival.

// 07.13.25