Purpose or Case Report: Reading Room Coordinators (RRCs) are crucial for radiology department operations. Studies have shown the positive impact of RRCs in improving workflow efficiency for radiologists. Despite their critical role in facilitating communication and minimizing disruptions to radiologists’, RRCs often experience significant workflow interruptions, primarily due to constant phone calls and multitasking demands. Our practice’s RRCs receive ~7700 inbound calls per week in addition to all outbound calls, emails, and legal requests. These interruptions may impact radiologists, radiology operations, other hospital departments, and patients and families downstream. We examined the barriers affecting RRC workflow using the SEIPS (Systems Engineering Initiative for Patient Safety) framework from human factors (HF). We implemented interventions to overcome those barriers to increase efficiency, reduce interruptions, and improve the work environment.
Methods & Materials: We conducted a SEIPS analysis to examine the workflow of RRCs. SEIPS helps study and improve the work of healthcare professionals and patients by systematically analyzing components (tasks, tools & technology, organization, environment, and people) of the work system and their interactions that produce work processes, that subsequently impact outcomes. Data was collected by HF-trained personnel through observations, shadowing, unstructured interviews, and phone call frequency counts. The results from the SEIPS analysis led to further data collection for 2 weeks where RRCs manually kept a log of extraneous calls.
Results: The SEIPS analysis revealed several barriers in RRCs' physical work environment including interruptions from patient registration-related requests and information overload from multiple resources. Inefficiencies were identified with the equipment and software used for transferring images. The staffing schedule was also not aligned with work volume. Observations revealed ~20% of phone calls received by RRCs per hour were extraneous. We developed and implemented interventions with RRCs to reduce these barriers.
Conclusions: The improvement of RRC workflow through a human-centered approach has impacted work and quality of life for our RRCs. By addressing the barriers identified in this study, such as phone call disruptions and task mismanagement, we can improve the working conditions for RRCs and, by extension, radiologists. Future efforts should focus on improving workload distribution and reducing interruptions in the workflow of RRCs.