I have a question for you medical folks out there.
Today I went to get a mammogram. My appointment was at 1 pm. The whole thing takes maybe ten minutes in itself. The tech told me I’d get a note in my online chart within a few days with the results. Nothing unusual there.
I left the appointment, ran some errands, came back home and fired up the computer to add the items I’d bought to my monthly expenses spreadsheet. Also opened email and saw there was a message saying there was a new test result in my chart. It was the mammogram results, saying the most recent images had been compared to the ones I’d had taken previously, no change. Obviously that’s good, since the previous results were also negative for malignancy.
Time of the email was 1:22 pm. So basically less than 10 minutes after my images were taken, a result was spit out and sent to me.
Did a human other than the tech who took them even look at the images? Or is this some kind of computer modelling, comparing the previous images to the new ones?
As a retired MD, I am no longer sure exactly how the images are reviewed anymore, but back in the day, it was not uncommon to have a mammogram or other scan end up getting reviewed by a radiologist within minutes of it being performed, with the interpretation completed and made available a couple of minutes after that.
Could they be farming it out to radiologists on line? We had a 3 am Lyft driver once who was a radiologist who did work between calls. He got a premium for interpreting scans in the middle of the night.
Nearly any work that can be outsourced to remote workers has been outsourced to remote workers.
IANA medical anything. But I did get chest xrays on two separate occasions from the same outfit in the last couple of months. Both of which had been read and the reports posted before I got home. By different docs with a sig line indicating their employer was some service someplace. Definitely not the outfit that captured the data. Which themselves are something close to a national franchise outfit.
Seems like an ideal line of work to outsource/remote. An image reading company might contract with hundreds of clinics and hospitals and on the other side contract with dozens of licenced radiologists. They can readily match supply & demand and by servicing many clients even out the peaks and valleys of who’s busy & who’s not.
It’s been that way for a while. That is now combined with a great deal of computer analysis and the result is a glut of radiologists in the US. That’s why a Lyft driver’s side gig is radiology.
Yes radiologists can work remotely and there are services hired out by some hospitals. Generally it requires an excellent connection and a good monitor.
Radiologists tend to be well paid enough that it would be a bit surprising to find one doing driving as gig work especially while also on a radiology work shift. But student loans can be killer I guess!!
My understanding is that AI is not replacing any radiologists yet but is instead serving as an additional level of quality control. Currently there is no “glut of radiologists”, cite please @TriPolar. Demand is pretty high. If anything there are shortages of qualified radiologists.
Looks like you are correct. I’m out of date on this or misinformed. I was told this by a radiologist around 10 years ago. I suppose there were other reasons he was having trouble finding work.
When I read the post about the Uber driver I thought “gee, can you interpret cancer diagnoses in the car on a cell phone screen, while picking up customers at 3 a m.?”
Back in the day, we’d always get two bills - one from the radiologist and one from the head of the radiology department for consulting. Once, the bill from the dept head came in the very middle of his month-long vacation; the appointment was after he’d left and the bill arrived before he returned. This happened frequently.
