Ensured physician priorities were considered and included in several of the prominent Surprise Billing legislative bills debated in Congress.
Maintained a leading role in the ongoing “Medicare for All” debate as a prominent member of the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future.
Successfully opposed continued legislative efforts to weaken or repeal the appropriate use criteria provisions included in the Protecting Access to Medicare Act of 2014.
Clinical Research
ACR Center for Research and Innovation™ was awarded seven renewal grant applications for six years of funding, through 2025, for NRG Oncology operations, the NRG Statistics and Data Management Center (SDMC), ECOG-ACRIN® (EA) operations, EA SDMC, the EA and NRG National Cancer Institute (NCI) Community Oncology Research Programs and the Imaging and Radiation Oncology Core®.
Imaging and Radiation Oncology Core was awarded two funding supplements by the NCI on targeted radiopharmaceutical therapy dosimetry to improve infrastructure and support for NCI Experimental Therapeutics Clinical Trials Network trials.
Published over 15 diagnostic imaging and 42 radiation oncology manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals.
Activated nine innovative clinical trials employing targeted agents, immunotherapy, proton therapy and treatment reduction strategies that seek to improve the survival and quality of life for patients with cancers of the lung, prostate, central nervous system, esophagus or oropharynx.
Continued the conduct and accrual of the Tomographic Mammography Imaging Screening Trial (TMIST) at over 87 sites in the United States, Canada and Argentina, with plans to open approximately 150 sites around the world.
Communications
ACR marketing campaign featuring patients and ACR accreditation earned the 2019 Gold Circle Award, a singular national recognition by the American Society of Association Executives.
Public Affairs helped launch short-term, micro-engagement volunteer opportunities by enlisting 26 early-career members as social media super users for ACR strategic priorities.
Secured 60,771 pledges on imagewisely.org from professionals in a variety of categories who promised to optimize their roles and participation in medically necessary imaging studies.
ACR social media referred 24,382 users to acr.org, 22,350 of which were new users.
Engaged over 1,600 people in the first-ever ACR Education Center Instagram Story takeover, a social media feature documenting a day in the life of a breast imaging course participant, which also generated 112 visits to acr.org/edcenter to learn more and register for an upcoming course.
Mobile visits to acr.org now represent 30% of all web traffic.
ACR spokespersons, resources and positions were quoted in 6,700 print and online news reports — 91% of all medical imaging or radiation oncology news coverage.
Apex Grand Award for magazine/journal: May 2018 Population Health Management Special Issue
Apex Award for excellence in feature writing: July 2018 Crossing the Line
Apex Award for excellence in design and illustration: September 2018 Back to School cover
Two Bulletin special issues included:
Patient- and Family-Centered Care
Well-Being
Informatics, Data Science Institute
Launched the ACR AI-LAB™ to enable radiologists to evaluate and create artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms at their own institutions using their own data. Began collaborating with seven pilot sites to set up the infrastructure and train algorithms locally.
Hosted the ACR Imaging Informatics Summit in Washington, DC, to enable radiologists to explore AI implementation in healthcare and participate in ACR AI-LAB demonstrations. Out of the 162 attendees, 88% reported feeling more prepared to implement AI in their practices.
Facilitated development and publication of the international Ethics of AI Multisociety Statement to set expectations and provide guidance on AI in radiology.
Published 85 additional AI use cases to provide guidance on the inputs and outputs of AI algorithms for researchers and industry developers of deep learning software. Included are 18 non-interpretive use cases.
Launched Member360, an initiative based on Salesforce and other member-facing technologies designed to better understand and communicate with members and their networks.
Published CARDS 2.0, the technological framework underlying assisted reporting for vendors to use with ACR Assist modules and controlled terminology such as the RADS and Common Data Elements.
Enabled digital pathology capabilities including scanning, storage and visualization for use in AIRP®, clinical research and AI model development.
Implemented the Wolters-Klewer/Cortex integration allowing the ACR to service online institutional and international subscriptions to Continuous Professional Improvement (CPI), as well as CPI authentication, authorization, content delivery and CME.
Enabled Case in Point reporting and benchmarking, allowing users to analyze their performance and see how they rank among their peers by topic or by experience level.
American Institute for Radiologic Pathology (AIRP®)
Delivered seven radiologic-pathology categorical courses to 191 practicing radiologists in the subspecialties of Neuro, MSK, Chest, Pediatrics, Cardiac, GI and GU.
Delivered 13 international courses, amounting to 234 lectures (147 lecture hours) to over 1,800 attendees.
Installed new histology slide scanner for improved rad-path case management.
Established a partnership with the Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute® to deliver a two-day course on the key concepts in health policy research, comparative effectiveness research and big data analytics.
Education Center
Since its inception, the Education Center has held nearly 500 course sessions and provided instruction to over 15,000 physicians from every state and 50 countries.
Offered 50+ courses across 19 topic areas, catering to nearly 1,700 attendees
Expanded offerings to include satellite courses in Arizona and Australia
Lifelong Learning
Published one free Radiation Safety Case on imagewisely.org.
Radiology-TEACHES® increased participation from medical school and affiliated programs to 20% of the medical school market and incorporated Imaging 3.0 case studies and JACR articles into the resources for the program. Launched the Workshop Tiers program to support radiology-Interest groups at medical schools.
RadExam™, a collaboration between the ACR and the Association of Program Directors in Radiology, continues to expand with 170 of 193 residencies participating and 21,465 exams completed. In the first 4.5 months of FY2019, 7,541 exams were completed representing an 18.3% increase year-over-year. Since its inception, over 30,000 exams have been completed.
Pathology Teaches, a collaboration with the College of American Pathology Foundation and the ACR, launched a successful pilot on educating medical students on appropriate laboratory testing.
The JACR® released 49 reader SA-CME activities, 15 reviewer SA-CME activities and a tooklit-related CME activity.
Four new Continuous Professional Improvement self-assessment modules were released in musculoskeletal radiology, pediatric radiology and ultrasonography, as well as a new special edition module in adult cancer imaging.
RLI speakers presented leadership-related lectures at 12 ACR state chapter meetings.
Awarded 10 resident scholarships for the 2019 RLI Leadership Summit, along with eight ACR chapters that awarded 18 scholarships for members to attend the Summit.
At the ACR Annual Meeting in May, the ACR Council — the ACR’s representative body — considered 45 resolutions during the 2019 Council Meeting, including seven policy resolutions and 34 Practice Parameters and Technical Standards.
96 Fellows of the American College of Radiology were inducted during the 2019 ACR Convocation.
The Meeting Mentor program was piloted at the ACR Annual Meeting with over 150 attendees participating.
107 e-abstracts were presented at the ACR Annual Meeting.
Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute®
Established research partnership with Georgia Institute of Technology to form the Health Economics and Analytics Lab (HEAL). HEAL focuses on applying big data analytics and artificial intelligence to large-scale medical claims databases — with a focus on medical imaging — to better understand how evolving healthcare delivery and payment models affect patients and providers.
Launched a new webinar series on Health Policy 101, “Translating Research to Evidence-based Health Policy”.
Published 30 papers in top scientific journals.
Membership Value
Nearly 2,500 ACR members volunteered for 300 active and unique volunteer opportunities on 22 commissions, 124 active committees, 36 subcommittee, 4 task forces and the new micro-engagement short-term opportunities.
The ACR Radiology Well-Being Program launched in May 2019, offering the Well-Being Index self-evaluation tool, a toolkit of well-being related resources, a curriculum for radiologists, residents and others, and a special ACGME-aligned curriculum for radiology residency programs.
Imaging 3.0 published 28 new case studies and 15 case studies were added to the AMA Ed Hub. Imaging 3.0 in Practice, was published as the new case study magazine.
The ACR Career Center served 21,468 job seekers and 10,246 employers.
Engage — the ACR online member community — posted 689 new discussion threads with more than 2,200 replies.
ACR 2019 welcomed 1,360 attendees, including 323 residents, 43 medical students and 174 staff.
Patient- and Family-Centered Care (PFCC)
Continued breaking records with over 2.5million monthly visits to Radiologyinfo.org, the patient education website hosted by ACR and RSNA, which now features Appropriateness Criteria patient-friendly summaries.
Launched My CT Colonography, a new ACR patient-friendly CTC screening center locator —designed to increase CTC utilization and patient awareness, thus saving more lives.
Created LCS resources for doctors, patients and nurse navigators to reach out directly to the committee via “ask the experts.” Also delivered LCS Economics one-pager for use by front line staff.
Completed survey and focus groups centered around patient value in speaking to radiologists, price transparency and patient-friendly reports.
Published the ACR Digital Mammography QC Manual to guide the development and implementation of quality control programs for digital mammography imaging equipment.
Used the ACR social media campaign #DitchtheDisk to successfully transition ACR Accreditation submissions from CDs to TRIAD, a workflow based image exchange application.
ACR Appropriateness Criteria began work on 49 Appropriateness Criteria (AC) topics and finalized 31 AC topics in FY2019. There are 189 diagnostic imaging and interventional radiology AC topics with 929 clinical variants and over 1,680 clinical scenarios.
Approved 40 ACR Practice Parameters and Technical Standards by the ACR Council and initiated the review of 38 documents in 2019. Currently there are 182 Practice Parameters and Technical Standards.
Completed 95 R-SCAN projects in diverse care settings with 50 projects in progress, 25% average improvement in high-value imaging exams ordered, 16,000+ cases reviewed for guideline adherence, and 4,000+ radiologists and 10,000+ referring providers engaged.
Finalized the CDS R-SCAN registry under the National Radiology Data Registry umbrella, providing image-ordering adherence by a variety of attributes such as clinical indication, ordering department with comparisons across the registry, and geographic regions or site characteristics.
