Please stop asking for radiology overreads when a study hasn’t been read by the original location

I understand that places are taking days or weeks to read studies. My group has a turnaround time of less than 3 hours for our hospital system.

As of late, doctors send patients to outside places with long turnaround times, see them back immediately, don’t have a read, and then expect me to drop everything and read the study for them.

Here are the issues:

1. I don’t get paid for this read, but the outside radiologist does.

2. I assume liability and a lot of doctors are putting in their note, “the report was not available but I reviewed it with the radiologist here…”. My malpractice insurance might not cover me because I didn’t officially establish care with the patient.

3. The doctor rarely tracks down the original report which could have something significant I missed.

4. It’s really disrespectful and bogus to assume that my time isn’t valuable and the outpatient you’re seeing to evaluate for rotator cuff tear necessitates my immediate attention.

I get there are exceptions, like a patient sees you for the first time and brings a disc with them. What I’m referring to is when the patient comes to see you within 2 hours of getting a study somewhere else and you want me to read it.