title: Quality improvement in neonatal digital radiography: implementing the basic quality improvement tools.
abstract: A quality improvement (QI) program may be implemented using the plan-do-study-act cycle (as a model for making improvements) and the basic QI tools (used to visually display and analyze variation in data). Managing radiation dose has come to the forefront as a safety goal for radiology departments. This is especially true in the pediatric population, which is more radiosensitive than the adult population. In this article, we use neonatal digital radiography to discuss developing a QI program with the principle goals of decreasing the radiation dose, decreasing variation in radiation dose, and optimizing image quality.
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, Seattle Children׳s Hospital and University of Washington, School of Medicine, Seattle, WA. Electronic address: heslamy@uw.edu.
authors.forename: Hedieh K
authors.initials: HK
authors.lastname: Eslamy
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, Lucile Packard Children׳s Hospital at Stanford, Palo Alto, CA.
authors.forename: Beverley
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Newman
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, Seattle Children׳s Hospital and University of Washington, School of Medicine, Seattle, WA.
authors.forename: Ed
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Weinberger
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007089:Image Enhancement; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D058996:Quality Improvement; D011856:Radiographic Image Enhancement / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D012449:Safety