Brent Townsend

Well, thanks, and thanks for having us here.

For me, as president and managing partner, the biggest bottleneck remains the shortage of radiologists relative to the growth in the volume of work.

Here at Wake Radiology, we have been fortunate enough to be able to recruit due to several advantages, practice stability, our reputation for quality, our location here in the triangle of North Carolina,

good relationships with two excellent training programs in our backyard in Duke and UNC.

And that recruiting success has allowed us to handle our organic growth while maintaining quality in short turnaround times.

However, in order to achieve our goals of expanding even further and providing even more access to our patients, we need to be able to recruit even more.

Well, that is absolutely a crucial question for all healthcare practitioners to be answering nowadays.

Because as you said, patient care and quality always have to come first.

And yes, it is challenging to balance that with the ever increasing expectations for patient access and for system-wide productivity.

On the radiologist side, there are a few things that we have done.

We have been very intentional with our growth plan, not taking on more new work than we can reasonably handle.

And we have set reasonable expectations for productivity from our radiologists, and then we help them achieve those goals with support.

For example, we have reading room coordinators who can answer the phone, send messages to referring physicians, and that helps limit the interruptions in the radiologist workflow.

We're using AI to help with the repetitive but necessary tasks.

For example, if I'm going to compare a study to the study that was done three months ago or a year ago, one of the things that has to be done is that we line up the studies correctly so that I can make a direct comparison of the liver on one image to the liver in the prior image.

And we have AI tools that can help us do that automatically.

Also, we're using AI tools that can help us with report correction and impression generation.

And by removing some of these tasks from the radiologist's plate, that allows us to spend more time actually interpreting the images, which is what we can do to make the most difference in the patient's lives.

And lastly, we are aggressively addressing burnout by looking at work-life balance.

We are prioritizing giving radiologists protective time off before and after call weekends, help them recover.