A Look Back at Emerging Strategic Themes for Guiding Change in Academic Radiology Circa 2005; Modeling Different Rates of Adoption of Organizational Innovations

Abstract

In 2005, three emergent strategic themes for academic radiology were identified to help deal with growing issues in the clinical, research, and educational missions. However, over the past two decades, these emergent strategic themes have actually evolved at different speeds with different levels of adoption by academic radiology departments. By considering these strategic themes as analogs to innovations, we have been able to apply concepts from the study of the diffusion of innovations and demonstrate the relevant "S-curves" so as to analyze the evolution of these strategic themes and their likely future courses. We have found that the emergent strategic theme of "throughput" has been fully adopted among academic radiology departments throughout the 2005 to 2025 period and is in the mature phase-at least with respect to the conventional approach of utilizing human radiologists without AI assistance to perform the key tasks of interpreting and reporting imaging studies. On the other hand, the emergent strategic themes of "teams" and "self-directed learning" for the research and educational missions, respectively, have been adopted only by a subset of academic radiologists and radiology departments during this period, with particularly low rates of adoption in the 2005 to 2015 period. Future development of each of these emergent strategic themes will be significantly impacted by the parallel development, introduction, and evolution of AI within academic radiology in the years to come.

Keywords: Adoption rate; Innovation; Self-directed learning; Teams; Throughput.