In 2016, HCIF began serving as partner to the Hospital & Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania (HAP) in the Partnership for Patients Hospital Improvement Innovation Network (HIIN), which is aimed at reducing readmissions and hospital-acquired conditions. For the HAP-HIIN CT Radiation Safety program, HCIF and ECRI Institute, a leading authority in imaging technology and radiation safety, work with hospitals to optimize and manage radiation doses with the goal of preventing undue exposure. While CT can be a life-saving tool for diagnosing illnesses and injuries, it is the largest single contributor of radiation dose delivering 100-400 times the radiation than a conventional x-ray.
In year two of this program, HCIF hosted its second webinar for the CT Radiation Safety Collaborative this past Tuesday, April 17, 2018 on the topic of CT accreditation. During this webinar, two collaborative hospitals shared their experiences via a panel discussion about how they first achieved and sustained accreditation. Hahnemann University Hospital and UPMC Cole served as a diverse set of panelists with one being a city academic medical center while another serves as a rural critical access hospital. Each organization expressed the importance CT accreditation had and the difference it made at their hospital while also describing the major hurdles and challenges they faced during the process. It is our hope that hearing these two diverse hospitals’ stories will encourage other Pennsylvania hospitals to recognize the value of CT accreditation and possibly initiate an accreditation process at their own organization if they have not already done so.
HCIF thanks our two organizations for serving as panelists on this webinar in addition to ECRI Institute for acting as webinar facilitator. If you’d like to watch the webinar recording, please click here, and be sure to keep an eye out for more HAP-HIIN CT Radiation Safety program updates in HCIF’s monthly Highlights.