Interventional Radiology Education for Improving Primary Care Provider Awareness

Abstract

To evaluate the effectiveness of a lecture series in increasing awareness and knowledge about common interventional radiology (IR) procedures amongst emergency medicine and internal medicine residents at a tertiary care academic medical center.A series of two 60-minute lectures was presented at both the Emergency and Internal Medicine weekly didactic conferences for the respective residency programs. The lectures covered the indications, contraindications, imaging, pre-procedure preparation, complications, and follow-up of common IR procedures, including both didactics as well as interactive question and answer segments. The first lecture included central venous access, IVC filters, and image-guided biopsies, and the second lecture covered biliary interventions, genitourinary interventions, and vascular embolization. Pre/post lecture assessments were given evaluating participant knowledge, and paired one-tailed t-tests were elucidated for evaluating differences in the mean scores.A total of 77 emergency and internal medicine resident physicians participated in assessments of the lecture series. There were significantly increased scores (P<0.001) after both of the lectures (36% to 82% on the first lecture and 44% to 65% on the second lecture), suggesting increased knowledge of the common IR procedures discussed in the lecture.This work demonstrated that educational initiatives such as lecture series implementation are effective methods to increase knowledge of common IR procedures and raise awareness of the specialty among referring providers.