Diagnostic imaging has been one of the fastest growing areas of health care in recent years. Some of that increase can be attributed to the availability of improved imaging studies, but whether some imaging utilization may be inappropriate has been an issue of concern. Now a study from the Institute for Technology Assessment in the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Department of Radiology finds that physicians who consistently refer patients to themselves or members of their own specialty for imaging studies, rather than to radiologists, are more likely to order such studies for a variety of medical conditions. The results suggest that economic motivation could underlie some of the excess referrals.
"It's looking like a significant part of the increase in imaging utilization is due to self- and same specialty referral," says G. Scott Gazelle, MD, MPH, PhD, director of the Institute for Technology Assessment, who led the study being published in the November issue of Radiology. "We need to have some mechanism in place to control this sort of inappropriate utilization of imaging."
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