Every healthcare accreditation organization promises some variation of the same two things, assurance of quality & assurance of safety. When it comes to either hospital / enterprise accreditation organizations (such as The Joint Commission [TJC] or DNV), or outpatient / MRI modality accreditation organizations (such as the American College of Radiology [ACR] or Intersocietal Accreditation Commission [IAC] ), how do we assess whether they’re living up to their promises of assuring safety?
This was the question I sought to answer with this poster presentation that was accepted to the 2023 ACR Annual Meeting, “How to QC MRI safety standards.”
In this poster, I propose two different ways to assess MRI safety accreditation standards… broadly with their combined effect on MRI adverse event rates, and specifically by testing best practice actions that we know can prevent injury accidents against the explicit minimum provisions of accreditation criteria.
The finding of the poster are that both in the macro sense (keeping total MRI accidents and injuries under control) and in the specific sense (minimum accreditation criteria that directly interrupt injury accident pathways), the major accreditation organizations’ minimum MRI safety accreditation standards are woefully inadequate.