June 3, 2013 — The American College of Radiology supports the May 31, 2013 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report which calls for establishing minimum national standards and an oversight framework for accreditation of advanced diagnostic imaging services.
“If accreditation is actually going to achieve a national standard of quality and safety for patients, there have to be legitimate, meaningful standards in place. [The] GAO report is a significant step in the right direction. The ACR looks forward to working with Congress, HHS, and other stakeholders to put the GAO recommendations into action,” said Paul H. Ellenbogen, M.D., FACR, chair of the American College of Radiology board of chancellors.
ACR accreditation requires that the physicians supervising and interpreting medical imaging meet stringent education and training standards. ACR accreditation also requires that the imaging equipment is surveyed regularly by qualified medical physicists to ensure that it is functioning properly, and that the technologists administering the tests are appropriately certified. The ACR also performs an evaluation of the actual image quality through scoring of various patient examinations and phantom images for each modality.
The ACR, whose accreditation programs date back to the 1960’s, has accredited more than 30,000 imaging and radiation oncology facilities nationwide and is the only nongovernmental accreditation program recognized under the Mammography Quality Standards Act (MQSA).
For more information: www.acr.org
