Designing a safer radiology department.

Objective: Patients presume safety in radiologic services, but the potential to do harm exists in every area of imaging. Radiology department personnel need to understand basic regulatory requirements for safety and how to promote and improve safety in the future.

Conclusion: This article reviews key safety metrics that we think are relevant to radiology and discusses how to define the measures and how we are attempting to translate the metrics into a culture of safety.

Patient safety event reporting in a large radiology department.

Objective: The purpose of this article is to describe our experience developing a Web-based radiology-specific event reporting system.

Conclusion: The Web-based safety event reporting system has been a valuable tool permitting us to address potential safety concerns in our department.