IR Section Meetings: Bringing IR Minds Together to Improve Healthcare

Summer 2019 — Synergy Radiology Associates recently held its first 2019 interventional radiology (IR) section meeting to review interventional radiology cases and promote quality and safety. Synergy interventional radiologist Michael Richter, M.D., organizes the meetings. He observed that it’s important to get everyone together as a team, share experiences and learn from each other.

“We’re making our large group smaller,” said Dr. Richter. “With a group our size, the IR team is spread out across a large geographic area. These section meetings create a forum where we can discuss patient care, review challenging cases and learn about the latest developments in interventional radiology.”

In addition to interventional radiologists, the IR section meeting involves physician assistants and nurse practitioners as well as device support staff.

“These regular gatherings also help increase collaboration and expand skill sets among our physicians,” noted Dr. Richter. “This undoubtedly leads to improvements in quality of patient care and helps our group to build practice capabilities in new or advanced procedures such as radioembolization, and bone ablations during kyphoplasty.”

A significant portion of the meeting focused on IR case reviews, where several of the physicians presented interesting IR cases they performed and discussed them in detail with the group. In the future, Dr. Richter plans to structure the meetings so they qualify as Continuing Medical Education (CME) events, which will enable IR physicians and supporting practitioners to gain CME education credits.