PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

Process Improvement

Executive Summary

Radiology service providers play an important part in the service industry making them bound to ensure quality service delivery. Service delivery and quality are essential components for customer satisfaction. The issue of delays in processing patients within radiology and X-ray departments is becoming a common problem these days. The hospitals must keep a check on the services provided by the radiology departments under their supervision. The health of relationships between hospitals and radiology departments has long been a concern in the industry with many organizations and task forces addressing this issue. The radiographer performs the examination which creates the images needed for diagnosis. Radiographers link patients and radiologists. By definition alone; information technology includes computers, communications networks, and computer literacy. Some radiographers have utilized their skill and expertise so as to increase the expertise available to patients, thus improving the health care of patients. As radiology progresses into the future, both IT and radiology personnel will both find themselves shifting roles in their everyday tasks and duties. As information technology expands the limitations of radiology to new boundaries, the educational requirements will also increase for both IT and radiology personnel to keep up to date with such changes. Various strategies and tools need to be adopted for ensuring better quality service delivery to the patients.

Process Improvement

Introduction

Radiology service providers play an important part in the service industry making them bound to ensure quality service delivery. Service delivery and quality are essential components for customer satisfaction. The issue of delays in processing patients within radiology and X-ray departments is becoming a common problem these days. The hospitals must keep a check on the services provided by the radiology departments under their supervision.

The management of the hospitals and radiology departments must take measures to ensure the quality service delivery to the patients using different tmanagement tools and strategies.

Rationale

Multiple failed organizational and departmental processes may lead to wrong-patient, wrong-procedure, wrong-side, and wrong-site errors in radiology services. Explanations for such errors are linked to similarities in sites, diagnostic studies, and patient names; breakdowns in communication or teamwork; patient and procedure factors; and failed safety systems.

In today's world where technology advancements have made every field efficient, it is necessary that the radiology departments should also adopt advance strategies and techniques along with intelligent management tools to reduce the delays in processing patients within X-ray departments.

Critical Discussion

Radiography is defined as the use of X-rays in viewing cross sections of non-uniformly composed material, for example, the human body. It involves the utilization of the physical properties of the ray so that an image can be developed. The X-rays that pass through are captured by a detector which gives a 2D illustration of all the structures. Radiography has been used for medical applications for quite some time. Treatment involving the use of radiation is called radiotherapy (Herman 2009).

Radiographers use the x-rays to create images of body parts and organs for diagnostic functions. Their roles vary depending on the type of x-ray that a patient ...