Research

HUMAN Centred Design

Patient photos boost radiologists’ performance.

By Reuters, By Julie Steenhuysen, Editing by Philip Barbara

Radiologists often have little direct contact with patients, but showing them a photo of a test subject can help improve their performance, the researchers told a meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago.

“Photographs of faces have an impact on quality,” Dr. Yehonatan Turner of Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem, who led the study, said in a telephone interview.

The photo reminds them “it’s not just a case,” said Turner, noting that doctors who saw a patient’s picture when they opened up an electronic file were more meticulous and more aggressive at looking for suspicious findings.

For the study, Turner and colleagues evaluated the quality of reports on 318 patients who underwent computed tomography, or CT scans, an advanced type of X-ray.

Out of the cases that were presented twice, doctors missed these incidental findings 80 percent of the time when the photograph was omitted from the file.

Turner said the photographs appear to make the radiologists more mindful of what is at stake for patients.

“Adding a photo had a positive impact on a radiologist’s performance,” Turner said.