In the study, the researchers made suggestions about how to improve the process by clarifying the roles of the radiologists and assigning responsibility to only one of them when it comes to ordering imaging studies. There were also duplicate orders because of the hospital’s system for naming unidentified patients, but they have come up with a new system that utilizes unique identifiers for each patient.

Overall, the hospital feels that they took good care of the patients. “I think, certainly, the faster we can get our imaging done, the faster the next step can happen, so there’s a potential for delays in care but in general, I think the patients that needed urgent care got that care,” said Sodickson.

He said that evaluating hospitals’ overall emergency response after a mass casualty event is very common, but that he hasn’t seen it done in radiology before. “We were trying to take a pretty novel approach to actually look at some of the time stamp data that we had available to us, and look quantitatively at our turnaround times,” he said. “We haven’t really seen that approach done in the past.”

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