Rescheduling Nonurgent Care in Radiology: Implementation During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Pandemic

To meet hospital preparedness for the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and ACR recommended delay of all nonemergent tests and elective procedures. The purpose of this article is to report our experience for rescheduling nonemergent imaging and procedures during the pandemic at our tertiary academic institution.

We rescheduled the nonemergent imaging and procedures in our hospitals and outpatient centers from March 16 to May 4, 2020. We created a tiered priority system to reschedule patients for whom imaging could be delayed with minimal clinical impact. The radiologists performed detailed chart reviews for decision making. We conducted daily virtual huddles with discussion of rescheduling strategies and issue tracking.

Using a snapshot during the rescheduling period, there was a 53.4% decrease in imaging volume during the period of March 16 to April 15, 2020, compared with the same time period in 2019. The total number of imaging studies decreased from 38,369 in 2019 to 17,891 in 2020 during this period. Although we saw the largest reduction in outpatient imaging (72.3%), there was also a significant decrease in inpatient (40.5%) and emergency department (48.9%) imaging volumes.

The use of multiple communication channels was critical in relaying the information to all our stakeholders, patients, referring physicians, and the radiology workforce. Teamwork, quick adoption, and adaptation of changing strategies was important given the fluidity of the situation.