One of the challenges with new standards is that your site may have to scramble to adapt. If the new standard requires, for example, an MRI Safety Committee with quarterly meetings, and your site doesn’t have available / willing staff to take on this additional burden, you’re dead-in-the-water, right? Not necessarily.
Since (the radiology equivalent of) the time of dinosaurs, hospitals with ionizing radiation-producing devices or isotopes have been required to have radiation safety committees with quarterly meetings. Recently we’re seeing the beginning of these requirements for MRI. If your site doesn’t currently have an MRI Safety Committee, we recommend you start one. If you don’t have the personnel or bandwidth to run it yourself, get someone to manage this new obligation for you.
Excerpt from VA MRI Safety Directive requiring MRI Safety Committee
While MRI Safety Committees aren’t yet explicit requirements in licensure or accreditation standards, they are rapidly becoming standard (read: “standard of care”) at hospitals and imaging providers across the US. But can you really add another set of non-patient-care expectations on radiologists or technologists? Even if the expectation for a regularly-meeting committee is clearly there, do you have willing / able staff to run it?
That’s where GRC can plug-in. We can manage scheduling the meetings, generate the agendas, collect new information, identify quality assurance and performance improvement objectives, produce meeting minutes, and monitor followups needed for the next quarterly meeting. Your site gets full compliance with expectations or requirements for an MRI Safety Committee with a key radiology staff commitment of as little as 1 hour every quarter.
More information on GRC’s suite of MRI safety services is always only a click away…