RADSC ACP Academic Day - 09 November 2019
The 2nd edition of the Academic Day was held on Saturday, 9 November 2019, in conjunction with the International Day of Radiology.
More than 80 clinicians, residents, radiographers, nurses, and scientists came together to learn from one another through talks and presentations by invited speakers and colleagues from the RADSC community. The Academic Day also provides an opportunity for RADSC junior researchers to showcase their research and education projects through oral and poster presentations, assessed by our guest judges: Dr Tan Cher Heng, Assistant Chairman Medical Board (Clinical Research and Innovation) & Senior Consultant Radiologist, TTSH, Dr Ian Tsou, Clinical Director (Radiology) of Parkway Health Radiology, and Dr Thian Yee Liang, Senior Consultant Radiologist from NUH.
Winners of the oral and poster presentations include:
Name
Designation, Department
Oral Presentation
1st
Dr Dorinda Chew
Resident, Diagnostic Radiology SingHealth Residency Programme
2nd
Dr Shih Yao-Chia
Research Fellow, RADSC ACP
3rd
Ms Chew Lay Ee
Senior Radiographer, Dept of Diagnostic & Interventional Radiology, KKH
Merit
Dr Mark Tan
Senior Resident, Diagnostic Radiology SingHealth Residency Programme
Dr Tan Zehao
Poster Presentation
Dr Rebekah Lee
Mr Bertwin Chen
Radiographer, Div of RADSC, SGH
Ms Cai Sihui
Senior Radiographer, Div of RADSC, SGH
With Artificial Intelligence (AI) as the theme for this Academic Day, our keynote speakers Dr Rama Sethuraman, Director (Medical Devices Branch) from Health Sciences Authority and Mr Praveen Kumar, Assistant Director (Engagement & Strategy) from the Ministry of Health, shared about the regulation of AI in healthcare and the target to launch the guidelines on AI by 2020.
This was followed by Dr Charlene Liew, who shared the fundamentals of AI as an advanced statistical model as well as deep learning. Invited speaker Dr Woojin Kim, Chief Medical Information Officer of Nuance Communications, then discussed on how we needed to appreciate the fear, hope, hype and challenges of AI in medical imaging. This was followed by a talk by Dr Thian Yee Liang, who shared a real-life example of how his team trained a deep learning algorithm for wrist fracture detection.
After the sharing on AI, it was time to put AI in action!
In a team battle where two teams raced against the clock to read and diagnose a total of 20 radiology images, Team Brain (without AI "clues") emerged victorious against Team AI (aided by AI "clues"). The AI "cheat sheet" had made some errors in reading the images, which in turn, misled Team AI. This nicely demonstrated that AI has its pitfalls, on which Dr Gideon Ooi (SingHealth Residency – Nuclear Medicine) elaborated further in his concluding talk.
With all that was said and demonstrated on AI, one might wonder what the future of AI in Radiology brings? Perhaps this quote by Dr Woojin Kim's mentor, Dr Curt Langlotz can provide some perspective - "Will AI replace Radiologists? The answer is NO - but Rads who use AI will replace Rads who don't." Something to ponder about indeed.
Symposium on Value-Based Care - 8 June 2019
L-R: Moderators for the Q&A, A/Prof Andrew Tan and Dr Lim Eng Kok, and speakers A/Prof Keith Lim, Prof Charles Kahn and Prof Kenneth Kwek addressing questions from the audience
Radiological Sciences ACP held its inaugural Symposium on Saturday, 8 June 2019 at the Academia, with the theme of "Value-Based Care: Are Radiologists Being Left Behind?" There were over 70 attendees, with Singhealth participants from various professions, as well as colleagues from NHG and NUHS.
We were honoured to have Prof Kenneth Kwek, DGCEO (Organisational Transformation and Informatics), SingHealth, A/Prof Keith Lim (Director, Clinical Quality, Performance & Value Division, Ministry of Health) and Prof Charles E. Kahn Jr., (Vice Chairman of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania, USA) as speakers at the morning's event.
Prof Kwek shared with the audience about SingHealth's implementation of Bundled Payment pathways, aimed at providing timely, right-sited care for a variety of patient groups. These included Hip Fracture, Caesarean section and Coronary Artery Bypass Graft patients. Prof Kwek also elaborated on how these programmes were measured; not only from the point of view of adherence rates to pathways, but also in terms of improvement in selected clinical outcomes and operational impact. This shift to Bundled Payments drove providers not just to decrease costs incurred to the hospital, but also to drive clinical and operational behaviour towards right-siting and improving appropriateness of care.
Next, Prof Lim shared with the audience some considerations behind the national push for Value-Based Care. The key factors were increasing life expectancies, an aging national population and rapidly increasing national healthcare expenditure. Using his prior experience in NUHS as an example, he shared that they took an approach that measured quality based on outcomes that mattered to the patient (such as wait times to consultation and length of stay) and total cost required to deliver outcomes over the full cycle of care. The determinants to improving value were thus scenarios where quality was improved (without sharp increases in cost), or where cost was decreased (without deterioration in quality). The best value could be achieved only if quality improved while costs decreased.
Outside of Singapore, the American College of Radiology (ACR) had begun an initiative to transition the practice of radiology from 'Volume-based' to 'Value-based' care. Prof Kahn spoke about the implementation of the appropriateness criteria for respective conditions, spearheaded by the ACR. The University of Pennsylvania had also implemented clinical decision support for imaging orders, and clinicians had found the regular weekly reports on imaging appropriateness to be particularly useful feedback. Aside from clinician-centric changes, Prof Kahn also shared improvements to value from the patients' point of view. For one, they were beginning to use a system of communication by annotating radiology reports to be more easily understood to patients who viewed them.
The RADSC community raised their questions in person or online via the Pigeonhole system.
There was a lively Question and Answer session between our panellists and the audience, with popular questions as follows:
