QUALITIES OF LIFE: HEALTH

By Leslie Goldman
Special to the Tribune
Published September 17, 2006

It sounds like a scenario you would see only on TV: You're in a car accident, you go to the emergency room, get an MRI or CT scan or some other routine medical imaging exam to check for injury and the radiologist finds more, much more, than he bargained for: a cancer.

Unfortunately, even though the radiologist sends a report of what he has found to the patient's doctor, these patients often can fall through the cracks of the medical system, due to incomplete handoffs, overwhelmed physicians and an inundation of incoming clinical information, according to Dr. Charles Marn, chief of radiology at the Ann Arbor VA and an associate professor of radiology at the University of Michigan Medical School.

To remedy the problem, Marn and his colleagues developed a computerized "safety net" of codes that radiologists could assign to each medical image in the form of electronic "tags." Scans that revealed an unexpected sign of cancer received a "Code 8" tag, meaning it required immediate follow-up by the patient's own physician.

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