Tracking Radiation Exposure

I was pleased to see that the forward-looking Intermountain Healthcare system has made the following announcement.
Intermountain Healthcare has launched a program that measures cumulative radiation doses patients receive over their lifetime for medical treatment. Intermountain hospitals and clinics are first in the country to compile the cumulative radiation patients receive from about 220,000 higher-dose procedures and imaging exams each year, starting with exams performed in the last quarter of 2012.

I have discussed some of the issues about cumulative radiation exposure in prior blogs: Cumulative Radiation Exposure; Radiation Exposure; Joint Commission Alert on Radiation Risk.

California Senate Bill 1237 requires that exposures from CT radiation be calculated for a specific patient and to a specific organ. Software like Radimetrics will assist in capturing and calculating the delivered dose to the radiologists as part of the reading workflow. Modern imaging equipment is capable of sending the exposure settings along with the images. This data is then manipulated to be specific to the type of study and the physical characteristics of the patient.

We still have an overarching problem which is part and parcel of the fact that as one of the foremost developed nations we still do not have a personal health identifier that can be used nationwide. In fact we have short-sighted laws in place that forbid the federal government from proposing or developing a national identifier. As a result, all the valuable data we collect is located in individual data storage systems which at this point do not have a standard for sharing this data. Unless an individual or their healthcare proxy is extremely organized and persistent in obtaining the information and placing it in a personal health record (PHR) such as MyMedicalRecords, we are still essentially stuck where we were before electronic health delivery systems where nobody knows how much radiation a patient has received to date.