By: Shawn McKenzie
Early in 2011, the State of California passed legislation requiring facilities utilizing computed tomography to record the procedural dose. My bet is that sweeping legislation is soon to come. Procedural dose benchmarks are being reevaluated; the ACR is engaged in facilitating the movement to capture dose and has enacted a dose registry; the Joint Commission is considering incorporating some radiation dose reporting and monitoring requirements to its accreditation process. While this activity on a national scale begins to develop, we must all ask ourselves realistically, what good comes from recording exposure from a single episode when the issue more likely to cause harm is a patient’s aggregate exposure over time?
