“’Normal’ is one of the most powerful words a radiologist can use”: Curtis P. Langlotz MD PhD, Professor of Radiology, Stanford University
After I used “clinically correlate” thrice in a row in my report, the attending radiologist asked, “How would you feel if the referring clinician said on the requisition for the study “correlate with images”? When you ask them to clinically correlate, you’re reminding them to do their job.”
I had been a radiology resident for six months – too soon to master radiology but not too soon to master radiology’s bad habits. I had acquired several habits, tics to be precise. These tics included saying “seminal vesicles are unremarkable,” which I stated remorselessly on the CT of the abdomen in males, even if the clinical question was portal vein thrombosis, sending, I suspect, several young men to existential despair. But the tic that really got under my attending’s skin was “cannot exclude.”The attending was Curtis P. Langlotz, the author of The Radiology Report, a book about writing effective radiology reports.
Ubiquitous in clinical care, and sometimes parody, radiology reports are enigmatic. What’s most striking about radiology reports is their variability. Reports vary in length, tone, precision and frequency of disclaimers. Reports vary in strength of recommendations for further imaging.
One radiologist may say “small pancreatic cyst, recommend MRI to exclude neoplasm.”Another, aware that the patient may cross St. Peter’s gate sooner rather than later, may bury the findings in the bowels of the report, hoping the clinician will spots its irrelevancy. Yet another, eager to be non-judgmental,might say “small pancreatic cyst, likely benign, but MRI may be considered if clinically indicated,” which, Langlotz notes, is vacuous because with pancreatic cysts there’s nothing clinically the clinician can anchor that recommendation on.
This past December after eight months of formal work the Senate Finance Committee’s “Bipartisan Chronic Care Working Group” released for comment a 30-page memo outlining 23 policy options to improve chronic care quality, patient outcomes and cost efficiency. While the Committee is not endorsing any of the options identified members will likely not stray far from this list when they move to drafting legislative language next month at least in part because members insist the bill must be cost neutral. Committee members and staff should be applauded for their effort to date since both political parties have been disinterested in adding policies to improve the Medicare program. (Last year’s MACRA bill was largely unpaid for and aptly described by Henry Aaron in the New England Journal of Medicine as a log rolling exercise.) On balance, the Committee’s effort should leave Medicare stakeholders cautiously hopeful. While some of the proposed options are obvious and incrementally beneficial, others might aid in innovating care delivery and in advancing CMS’s efforts to improve quality and value payment.
We have been talking about Precision Medicine for a long time now but so far we are still in the infancy of using genetics to impact medical decision making. The human genome was sequenced in 2003,with the promise of rapid medical advances and genetically tailored treatments. However, development and adoption of these treatments has been slow. Today with the advent of large cohorts, and in particular, the construction of the US Government’s Precision Medicine Cohort,
