Measuring Radiologist workload

During the 1980s and 1990s, many Irish hospitals utilized a RIS system developed and supported by Keogh software. This system assigned workunits to different radiologic studies. The figures used were often erroneously utilized to assess radiologist activity. In fact, the workunit allocations were originally intended to reflect radiographer workload, and were heavily weighted to reflect the hospital department in which the system was first developed. Thus, workunit assignments existed in the system for procedures commonly performed in that department at the time of the system’s development, while there were no assignments for procedures not performed at that particular site. In addition, an arbitrary maximum number of 60 workunits was embedded in the system; thus, even if a department tried to keep the workunit assignments up-to-date, they had no facility to assign an appropriate value to a new, complex and very time-consuming interventional procedure which had not been available when the system was first developed.