Creating joy in the workplace

Coaching in a Radiology department

Coaching is an effective tool that seeks personal reflection as a way for people to find their own solutions. In this article we show our results when applying it in our Radiology Service. The article includes a bibliographic review on its potential applications in Medicine and in Radiology. We specifically reviewed the fields of improving self-care and preventing burnout as well as the teaching field, both for residents in training and for certified radiologists.

Sharing Patient Praises With Radiology Staff: Workflow Automation and Impact on Staff

OBJECTIVE

This study aims to develop and evaluate a semi-automated workflow using natural language processing (NLP) for sharing positive patient feedback with radiology staff, assessing its efficiency and impact on radiology staff morale.

METHODS

The HIPAA-compliant, institutional review board-waived implementation study was conducted from April 2022 to June 2023 and introduced a Patient Praises program to distribute positive patient feedback to radiology staff collected from patient surveys. The study transitioned from an initial manual workflow to a hybrid process using an NLP model trained on 1,034 annotated comments and validated on 260 holdout reports. The times to generate Patient Praises e-mails were compared between manual and hybrid workflows. Impact of Patient Praises on radiology staff was measured using a four-question Likert scale survey and an open text feedback box. Kruskal-Wallis test and post hoc Dunn's test were performed to evaluate differences in time for different workflows.

RESULTS

From April 2022 to June 2023, the radiology department received 10,643 patient surveys. Of those surveys, 95.6% contained positive comments, with 9.6% (n = 978) shared as Patient Praises to staff. After implementation of the hybrid workflow in March 2023, 45.8% of Patient Praises were sent through the hybrid workflow and 54.2% were sent manually. Time efficiency analysis on 30-case subsets revealed that the hybrid workflow without edits was the most efficient, taking a median of 0.7 min per case. A high proportion of staff found the praises made them feel appreciated (94%) and valued (90%) responding with a 5/5 agreement on 5-point Likert scale responses.

CONCLUSION

A hybrid workflow incorporating NLP significantly improves time efficiency for the Patient Praises program while increasing feelings of acknowledgment and value among staff.

Night and Day, Why Radiologists Need Play

What is play and why does it matter for radiologists? Play can take many forms in the workplace, including organic, managed, task-related, diversionary, and resistive forms of play, and play may also take the form of authentic self-expression and creation. In this review article, we will discuss the benefits of play including improved problem solving, gaining perspective, and stress reduction, and also provide low-tech and high-tech examples of beneficial play for the radiology team in work and personal contexts.