From the November 2020 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

Radiologists make more errors when interpreting CT studies at night
In August, researchers at Mayo Clinic found that radiologists make more errors when interpreting CT studies overnight than they are when examining scans in the daytime.

The rate of errors was higher in off-hour body CT scans interpreted overnight, and particularly in the latter half of nighttime assignments. More broadly, the error rates were worse at night than during the day.
“The radiologists who were working overnight had schedules set up to give them ‘ample rest’," study author Dr. Maitray D. Patel, professor of radiology at Mayo Clinic Arizona, told HCB News. “They had 11 hours off before starting any assignment, and only worked a maximum of five nights in a row. The point is that someone has to read out the body CTs that occur after-hours, but are they susceptible to making more errors in doing that just because it is being done at night and they don’t always have a night schedule? Our study suggests that there is some impairment, even if they are well-rested for the night shift.”

Discrepancies affecting acute or follow-up clinical care were classified as errors. Daytime hours were between 7am and 5:59pm, while nighttime was between 6pm and 6:59am.

The team examined 10,090 body CT studies of the pelvis, abdomen or both, interpreted between July 2014 and June 2018. Scans were independently interpreted in-house and off-hours by radiologists who were part of a non-ACGME-accredited fellowship and were reviewed by an attending radiologist within 10 hours of initial interpretation, with the fellow interpretations submitted as complete final reports. Attending radiologists were specialists in body imaging, while the initial interpreting radiologists were fellows training in breast imaging (12 fellows), musculoskeletal imaging (eight fellows), or body MR (12 fellows).

Patel notes that body CT studies are notoriously one of the types of studies in which more errors are made by non-specialists, and says one possible reason may be the function of the number of different organs that must be evaluated.

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