The Diagnostic Radiology Life Cycle guidance

We are pleased to announce the publication of a new RCR guidance document entitled ‘The Diagnostic Radiology Life Cycle’.  

Diagnostic radiology contains a large body of specialist terminology relating to its business processes and workflow which are not standardised in usage across organisations. This makes communication error prone, especially for clinical and management teams working with and assessing performance between radiology services.  

This document defines a standard workflow for diagnostic imaging episodes (The “Diagnostic Radiology Life Cycle”) from the point of referral to result delivery by defining and detailing each of the timepoints on the journey of an examination through three key stages: pre-acquisition, image acquisition and post-acquisition. 

Lead author Dr Dan Fascia, Chair of the RCR’s Radiology Informatics Committee said “Radiology is full of complex and conflicting terminology that leads to errors of communication, many of which relate to processes rather than the images we create. For the first time, we have attempted to formally define a standardised set of terminology for the predictable stages of diagnostic radiology processes. We hope that this will alleviate some of the difficulties radiology departments have in demonstrating their bottlenecks and demonstrating the high value we bring to contemporary healthcare”. 

The RCR extends its gratitude to Dr Fascia and the members of the Informatics Committee.