The University of Wisconsin-Madison CT Protocol Optimization Team has been keeping very busy. Not only have we continued to see increased distribution of the UW CT protocols (1,175 GE scanners were shipped with our protocols installed through September 2017), but more importantly, we’re seeing increased utilization. It is still a bit slower than we like, but it’s accelerating.
We are proud to announce that this month a major health care consortium in the South has decided to convert their entire CT operation to the UW protocols. This may be the break we have been waiting for as other large providers will certainly take notice. In this era of cost containment and standardization, our protocols deliver just that, so we hope more organizations will adopt them.
Radiologists, physicists, and technologists, both inside and outside of our organization, have provided their CT expertise and collaboration to identify areas for improvement, and we are happy to declare that many of those improvements were implemented in Version 3.0 of the UW CT protocols, which were submitted to GE in December after extensive validation.
Congratulations to all of us — the CT protocol optimization team; the UW Radiologists (both academic and community), especially the CT section leads; the medical physicists; all of our hardworking technologists and nurses; and the IT support staff. We thank all of you for your constant surveillance of protocol and CT image quality and helping make our protocols so robust. There is nothing else like this on the planet.
It has been a wonderfully fulfilling adventure so far and promises to just keep getting more interesting.
– Myron A Pozniak, MD