Relationships between clinicians and radiologists: State of the current situation, suggestions for improvement

Imaging takes a more and more important place in modern medicine. Quality of relationship between producers and consumers of imaging is therefore essential. However, daily practice shows that this is not always the case. The first difficulties arose in the 1980s with arrival of cross-sectional digital imaging and the revolution that this brought about: explosion of the number of images that made their full reproduction impossible, stupendous technological development which involved the active intervention of a radiologist, consultation of digital images through computerized means, unevenly distributed, an finally multimodal imaging, adding a further level of complexity to the system. Hence the emergence of relationship difficulties between radiologists and clinicians, and the medical and professional consequences that this entailed. A quick survey shows that only one on seven imaging requests is correctly labeled. Such an indigence seems mainly linked to a lack of time (the average duration of the consultation with a general practitioner is 15 min), sometimes of competence, bad habits and a gradual depersonalization of professional relationships. From then, other the radiologist do the job of the clinician and asks himself the question he imagines to be that of the clinician, with the degree of uncertainty that this implies, other he doesn't, and his answer will be imprecise and of a little use. Currently, the physical media of medical images will soon be just a memory, replaced by CD or an email address with a password, whose access is of varying difficulty, sometimes easy, often time-consuming or even impossible due to the great inhomogeneity of reading software's and a lack of computer equipment and training of clinicians. They are therefore forced to solely rely on radiological reports, of unequal value for lack of clinical information, too often limited to a simple description of the images, without synthesis. Vicious circle. In its recommendations to improve this state of affairs, the French national Academy of medicine, therefore asks clinicians to describe in a sentence or two the purpose of their requests, radiologists to engage by making a synthesis in their reports and to continue to provide images on physical media until the end of the transitional period that we are going through, for manufacturers to harmonize their reading software's and to funds to massively help clinicians, especially in private practice, to invest in high-performance computer equipments. (C) 2021 l'Academie nationale de medecine. Published by Elsevier Masson SAS. All rights reserved.