Are patients ready for communication with radiologists? Results of the R2P2 survey.

Background: Patient empowerment requires that patients have enough information to make decisions concerning their own health. If patients are to discuss imaging results with radiologists, they have to know who these medical professionals are and what they do.

Purpose: To examine whether patients understand the role of radiologists, and if particular subgroups are better informed than other ones.

Software solutions alone cannot guarantee useful radiology requests.

Background The availability of clinical information and a pertinent clinical question can improve the diagnostic accuracy of the imaging process. Purpose To examine if an electronic request form forcing referring clinicians to provide separate input of both clinical information and a clinical question can improve the quality of the request. Material and Methods A total of 607 request forms in the clinical worklists for a computed tomography (CT) scan of the thorax, the abdomen or their combination, were examined.