Fighting COVID-19: One Radiology Department’s Experience

[...]an educational video provided by the Society of Thoracic Radiology was disseminated to all our radiologists.8 These highlighted key imaging features of COVID-19, including the presence of bilateral, rounded ground-glass or consolidative opacities that are predominantly in a peripheral and basilar distribution.2-4, 9-14 To further increase awareness of imaging appearances of COVID-19, we shared images of confirmed COVID-19 cases, with patient data de-identified. Time Shifting to Decrease Redundancy, Increase Efficiency, and Expand Radiologist Roles Under directives from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, our county public health department, and our hospital, certain elective interventional and diagnostic examinations have been postponed to decrease hospital traffic and the risk of spreading the infection. While some medical centers have reported directing their attending and resident radiologists to help provide care on their clinical wards,16 our hospital has not engaged radiologists in this manner at this point, but the Permanente Medical Group is exploring the possibility of doing so in the event of an infection surge. [...]we have established individual radiologist rotations to perform these newly implemented protocoling tasks.