A new study from the Harvey L. Neiman Health Policy Institute, a medical imaging socioeconomic research organization, found that the time between an imaging scan and its interpretation for office/hospital outpatient imaging increased by 27 percent between 2023 and 2024. The study, based on 2.9 million office/hospital outpatient Medicare imaging studies and published in the Journal of the American College of Radiology (JACR), updated a previous Neiman Institute study of turnaround times through 2023.

According to a press release, the authors found that turnaround times increased 177 percent over the 2014-2024 period, with 92 percent of that increase occurring in 2022-2024, based on an extended Medicare claims analysis through 2024 using data released this year. The previous study found that turnaround times increased 113 percent over the 2014-2023 period, with 87 percent of that increase occurring in 2022 and 2023.

“The finding that turnaround times continued to increase in 2024, on top of the sharp increase in 2023, tells us this is a genuine, persistent trend. Turnaround times were largely flat through 2021 and then climbed sharply each year since, especially in 2023 and 2024,” Eric Christensen, Ph.D., research director at the Neiman Institute and study senior author, said in a statement.

“With radiologists already in short supply amidst rising imaging utilization, our results amplify existing concerns about the ability of the current and future radiologist workforce to provide patients with timely results without a solution to dampen growing imaging demand,” Greg Nicola, M.D., with Hackensack Radiology Group, vice chair of the Board of Chancellors of the American College of Radiology, and study coauthor, said in a statement.