Millions of radiology reports produced by imaging centers include follow-up recommendations for further testing. But only a fraction of patients returns for follow-up scans, making follow-ups a significant opportunity for imaging center growth today.
This document presents
- Imaging follow-up gap in 2023 - numbers, factors, and new directions
- Why addressing the follow-up gap is a priority for an imaging center?
- What is the potential impact of follow-up management?
Imaging follow-up gap
The gap in numbers
The ‘follow-up gap’ is one of the leading challenges in radiology, with many patients not returning for further tests recommended in initial reports.
Industry studies and Agamon Health’s own internal data show that 10% of all imaging studies require some type of follow-up.
77% of follow-up recommendations are CT, MRI & PET
Only 15% of these patients actually adhere to the recommendation. In some populations, the impact of loss to follow-up is much more profound. Particularly in low-income areas, the adherence rate is significantly lower, putting an additional burden on a population that typically has numerous healthcare challenges.
There are a number of factors creating this significant adherence gap. Siloed healthcare infrastructure is a primary cause where a lack of communication between the imaging centers and their referring providers leads to patients ‘falling between the cracks.’ While the challenge of siloing is not unique to radiology, the impact is significant in this area.
New trends & directions:
Historically, radiology organizations have performed reads of imaging studies and assumed that the rest of the healthcare organization would be responsible for ensuring patients' follow-up on their recommendations for their care. More recently, the ACR Quality Committee (and other standards organizations) have encouraged radiologists to assist in assuring the quality and continuity of care for these patients.
Given that so many diseases are originally diagnosed with radiology and, typically, there are no central groups within the health system responsible for ensuring the follow-up of general radiology patients, radiologists/imaging centers can be the protagonists to make this happen.
Why should addressing this gap be a high priority for imaging centers?
Addressing the adherence gap in radiology is essential, both for patient care and optimized operations within imaging centers.
Radiology is a vital component in maximizing patient care outcomes. Loss to follow-up puts patients’ health at risk.
Diagnostic radiology is the beginning of the care pathway for many common diseases.
5 out of the 8 most common diseases (defined by the CDC) are identified through an initial imaging study.
Cancer, Chronic lower respiratory disease, Stroke, Alzheimer's disease, Kidney disease
From a quantitative perspective, for every 125,000 exams an imaging center conducts per year, 10,625 patients fail to adhere to follow up recommendations. If only 10 % of those patients suffer from one of the most common diseases, then 1,062 patients with potentially life-threatening diseases will have their adherence to a care pathway delayed or missed. This could result in a catastrophic impact on the health of the patient (e.g. metastasizing of cancer).
Improving the gap between follow-up recommendations and adherence has significant benefits for imaging centers themselves, enabling them to offer greater value to referring providers.
- Streamlining communication between imaging centers and referring providers can be challenging. Unlike radiology departments within healthcare systems, imaging centers find all of their referring providers externally to their organization. This makes communication a struggle, especially when it is performed manually especially as utilization increases.
- Offering greater value to referring providers can also help scale imaging center usage. Referring providers are the key drivers of revenue for imaging centers and typically, those referring providers have multiple imaging centers to choose from in their healthcare community. So, providing a differentiated service, especially one that focuses on quality is an opportunity to truly partner with this critical source of patients.
How can automation close the adherence gap?
Today, many imaging centers are automating their follow-up process to streamline efforts and improve adherence. By deploying AI-based automation, imaging centers are able to end their dependence on manual methods for follow-up.
Integrating into existing systems, AI automated systems first analyze radiology reports to identify follow-up recommendations using generative AI & NLP. They then automatically communicate those findings to the referring physician. This drives forward the follow-up process, with physicians able to encourage patient adherence and patients knowing what is the next best course of action. Patient adherence is tracked to ensure that the advised process is followed, providing a clear audit trail.
Adherence rates increase without requiring the imaging center to hire extra staff. In fact, the workload is reduced on care coordinators freeing their time to deal with patients and providers.
What impact does improved follow-up adherence have on an imaging center?
Besides mitigating risk, there are several other areas that an AI-automated follow-up solution can positively impact an imaging center:
- Increased Utilization/Revenue: Simply put, increased follow-up means increased demand for imaging center services within the same pool of patients. The modalities of these follow-ups are primarily in the higher cost modalities (e.g. MRI, CT, PET scans). As an example, for every 125,000 scans that a center performs, improved follow-up adherence creates an opportunity to derive $2.2 million of additional revenue.
- Operational Efficiency: Many centers have people follow up with different populations/programs as referring providers. A manual process has two primary drawbacks – identifying which reports should be followed up on often leaves many missed reports and it is too laborious to make it cost-efficient to stay current with the reports. At one healthcare organization, they were missing >70% of reports requiring follow-up with their previous manual process. It would have cost them >$2M per year in FTE expenses to continue manually tracking the reports requiring follow-up.
- Quality of care Enhancement: While every imaging center manages/measures quality differently, an increase in adherence (especially with patients in low-income areas) has a profound impact on quality. With a greater number of patients attending follow-up screening and therefore a greater number of common diseases being detected, the imaging center will improve its standing within the healthcare community. Also, this type of improvement in quality provides a brand enhancement impact to referring providers.
- Improvement in the quality of reporting: Another benefit of AI automation is the improvement in the internal QA process. Imaging centers are able to evaluate their recommendations as a bulk data set. It allows them to improve upon the verbiage and specificity of the recommendation, identifying potential areas of improvement. This provides management with the data required to build processes and systems from large data sets, as opposed to small anecdotal feedback.
- Improved Referring Provider Relationship – AI automation of follow-up enables imaging centers to improve their relationship with their referring provider network. They have an opportunity to jointly service patients, have strategic discussions with these providers, minimize “leakage” to other imaging providers, and even attract new referring providers to their network.
Successfully deployed in leading healthcare institutions in the US
The significant impact of AI-automated follow-up can have on patient care and imaging center revenue is already being felt by centers around the US.
Agamon's Generative AI Automated solution has been successfully deployed in leading healthcare institutions in the US such as Henry Ford Health System, Main Street Radiology and HALO Diagnostics, where it demonstrated a significant increase in follow-up recommendations identified and patient adherence rates. The solution helps healthcare organizations improve operational efficacy and bridge their patient care gap.
Conclusion: Better follow-up benefits all
As we have seen, loss to follow-up risks patient lives and reduces the standard of care, which can lead to potential lawsuits and reputation damage. All of this turns follow-up management into one of the key priorities for imaging centers in 2023.
Novel AI-based technologies allow imaging centers to improve their patient follow-up today quickly and effectively with AI automation. Not only does automating follow-up lead to better patient care and lower risk for imaging centers, it also opens up new revenue streams and enhances the relationship with referring partners.
AI automation for follow-up is a win-win solution for both imaging centers and patients.
