Facing a staffing crunch in pediatric radiology? Has your group considered PRA?

Our established 10 person pediatric radiology group was about to enter an unprecedented staffing shortage about this time last year. Fortunately at last year’s Society of Pediatric Radiology annual meeting we met those responsible for forming a new teleradiology service, Pediatric Radiology of America (PRA), in which image interpretation by CAQ certified/eligible pediatric radiologists was available. Fortunately for our group at Arkansas Children’s Hospital, one of the PRA physicians was a past colleague of many of our staff and our comfort level to partner with this company was high.

Over several months following the SPR meeting we compared PRA to an established teleradiology firm which had much more staff and many years of experience but only one pediatric radiologist on their staff. With PRA we felt like we could gain coverage from multiple pediatric radiologists when making out a tight monthly work schedule.  Our radiology PACS administrators and hospital IT PACS support staff were satisfied with information gleaned from a conference call with the PRA management team. The rates for image interpretation were competitive and the terms of the working contract with PRA were reasonable.

We worked with the PRA credentials staff to get several physicians licensed to read teleradiology images in our state and get credentialed at our hospital. Once doing so by September, 2007 we have used PRA on average for two to three nights of evening image interpretation each week. The service received has been well received by the involved emergency department and evening pediatric clinic referring pediatricians. On a “PRA night” these referring clinicians get several more hours of “final” image interpretation than they would on our regular evening week night call shift.

PRA has helped us get through the most difficult staffing year we have had at our growing children’s hospital over the past two decades. We plan to continue to partner with this growing company even when we return to a normal staffing level in the future. PRA has helped us cope with multiple concurrent retirements in our group and overlapping periods of staff medical leave.

I do not hesitate to give PRA and their pediatric radiologists two thumbs up.

Sincerely,

Charles A. James, M.D.
Medical Director, Pediatric Radiology
Arkansas Children’s Hospital