Carestream has launched various educational initiatives for radiology imaging professionals. What is the rationale behind them?
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Mirna Bassil
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At Carestream, one of the top priorities has always been to help customers be on the leading edge in their profession. For this, not only we bring them high-end innovative digital X-ray imaging solutions but we also offer them various best-practice sharing initiatives. One of such best-practice sharing initiative of Carestream is eRadiograph, which is a bi-yearly clinical publication in an ebook format written by experts, who are a reference in their field.
Another initiative is our CWORI Programme (Carestream Workshop on Radiology and Imaging.) We conduct this programme in cities across India, where we invite experts from the radiology field to talk about current best practices in radiology.
We are also happy to run our CROP programme, or Carestream’s Radiographer Orientation Programme, in which our application specialists provide training to radiographers on digital X-ray imaging.
We are proud to have a panel of more than 20 medical imaging professionals, all veterans in their field, who help us in executing these educational initiatives. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them for their trust and continuous support.
Tell us more about eRadiograph?
This is a clinical e-journal written by various renowned practising radiologists on current best practices in medical imaging. For each edition of eRadiograph, we invite a different author to write on a different topic. It is available free of cost to all medical imaging professionals. They just need to login to our website www.Carestream.in and register for current as well as future issues of eRadiograph.
How do you create awareness about the new edition of eRadiograph?
We have our own database of practicing radiologists. On the release of every issue we make an email announcement to these medical imaging professionals. We also create awareness about this through CWORI and CROP programmes as well as in various local and national radiology conferences. During these events whoever wants to subscribe to eRadiograph is welcome to simply fill-in the subscription form in order to start receiving eRadiograph.
We are happy to notice that eRadiograph is promoting itself. The quality of the content is generating excellent word-of-mouth among the radiology professionals, which results in drawing more and more of them to login to our website and subscribe online.
Elaborate on CWORI programme and its benefits?
Carestream Workshop on Radiology and Imaging is an interactive programme, where we invite expert/s to share best practices in medical imaging with local medical imaging professionals. We started this initiative in the year 2010 and till date have conducted more than 40 such programmes in almost all A, B and C class cities in India. These programmes have been attended by more than 2000 medical imaging professionals. On an average, we conduct around 10-12 programmes in a year.
We try to customise every CWORI programme by selecting the presentation topic and speaker/s as per the feedback received from the local medical imaging professionals. These two to three hour programmes proved to be a highly interactive platform for local imaging professionals. They actively participate to get detailed insight into a particular topic, as well as get answers to their queries directly from the subject matter’s expert.
What are CROP programmes all about? What are their benefits?
Carestream Radiographer Orientation Programme is a two to three hours training session designed specifically for radiographers and conducted by our application specialists. The objective of this programme is to educate radiographers about the basics of X-ray systems and on how to effectively produce better quality X-ray images suiting the preference of practicing radiologists. The programme also covers usage and troubleshooting techniques for CR, DR and Laser imagers that lead to keeping the maximum uptime of the equipment. At the end of these training programmes we provide certificates to the participants. We launched CROP last year and we have already conducted 10 programmes in 10 different cities across India, benefiting more than 1000 radiographers. We intend to organise 10-12 of such programmes every year.
What kind of response have you received so far? Any important feedback from radiology professionals on these programmes?
We are thrilled by all the positive feedback and continuously increasing participation in all of our educational initiatives. The numbers speak for themselves! eRadiograph’s has now a 2000 plus subscriber base, which keeps growing. CWORI programmes have been attended by more than 2000 medical imaging professionals while the CROP programmes received over 1000 participants in one year. Many imaging professionals have written to us to tell us that they preserve copies of our eRadiograph for their future reference. In their feedback, readers also often suggest preferred topics for the coming issues of eRadiograph. On the other hand, imaging professionals proactively ask us to organise CWORI and CROP programmes in their territory.
Are these initiatives introduced only in India?
The idea of developing eRadiograph and organising CWORI and CROP programmes originated in India. The success of eRadiograph has crossed the borders; we offer it online on our corporate website as well and thus people from all over the world can subscribe on carestream.com/ eRadiograph. In other parts of the emerging markets region we offer similar educational events to CWORI and CROP tailored to the local needs and socio-cultural specificities of each country. At Carestream, we strive to be a trusted partner for the radiology professionals; therefore, all over our region and the rest of the world, we always look for initiatives that contribute to improving the radiology skills set.
What are your future plans?
We intend to continue with and take these educational initiatives to the next level by encouraging more and more participation from medical imaging professionals both as audience as well as key opinion leaders speakers. We will enrich the content of eRadiograph even further by offering a larger variety of topics and getting them covered from different angles by different experts. We also intend to increase the frequency and reach of CWORI and CROP programmes in order to make them available to the maximum number of medical imaging professionals all over India.