Radiology Leadership Role

Radiology is vital to the healthcare system, and an irreplaceable part of the care team in finding the cure pathway. Leaders play a significant role in the success of a radiology department. The supervisor in charge of the imaging department leadership has three responsibilities which are building a collaborative relationship with technologists, conducting periodic meetings, and financial management.
The first responsibility of the leader in the radiology department is to establish a constructive relationship with team members and create effective organizational structure. Since employees play a crucial role in the department's success, she created opportunities for them to be part of a care team by describing roles for each staff member. In
fact, a leader can't perform everything alone and expect morale grow within the team members. In order for a department to be productive, there should be appropriate scheduling, coverage, and utilization of personnel and supplies. Furthermore, proper usage of up-to-date equipment and considering the staff needs to perform their duties ensures their satisfaction. After delegating responsibilities between the staff, she employs a system to award technologists for their accomplishments, therefore, employees are encouraged to reach their fullest potentials. As a result of building dynamic relationships between members of the radiology group, she creates a productive department in which values team building, mutual respect, and self-esteem to provide the highest quality care for patients.
The second responsibility of the leader in the imaging department is to conduct periodic meetings with the staff to keep abreast of what is happening in the department, stay up to date on American College of Radiology(ACR) requirements, and discuss patient satisfaction rate.
As a matter of fact, collecting surveys from patients and asking them about their health care experience enables her to understand the department strengths and weaknesses. After sharing the collected information with the staff, team members are motivated to continue caring for patients and make improvements on their performances. When she recognizes issues regardless of their nature, she can improve the department's performance and change the course of action to pave the path to achieve organization's mission. Moreover, the radiology department must be compliant with ACR guidelines in order to decide on radiology protocols which help physicians to find the most appropriate treatment plan for the patient. Her responsibility is to use ACR tools such as dose index registry to monitor the radiation dose that a patient receives during a radiology procedure. If there's an increase in radiation dose, she gets a report to investigate the reason behind it, and she informs the technologist to explain the situation. Therefore, a technologist is accountable to keep patients dose as low as possible. When she follows ACR guidelines, the radiology department continues to receive referrals from outside network physicians and
patients.
The third responsibility of the leader in the radiology department is financial management. Declining reimbursements, growing competition and evolving models of care are pervasive operational challenges. She keeps expenses under control by utilizing technologies such as picture archive and communication system (PACS), and technologists are educated on how to use them to increase their productivity. She is also responsible to ensure that proper billing codes are used by staff when completing a study so that the radiology department can get reimbursement from insurance companies. Currently, hospitals view the imaging department as a replaceable service to reduce cost. Therefore, it has never been more important for her as a leader to increase the volume of services that the radiology department offers to patients in order to make more revenues and increase the value of the department. As a consequence, the staff sometimes works long hours to meet the department financial goal.