A practical guide to quality improvement in nuclear medicine.

Innovations and improvements in the field of nuclear medicine have created remarkable image accuracy and detail, which allow physicians to better diagnose disease. This ability has led to dramatic differences in patient care. To ensure that these diagnoses are reliable, imaging facilities must constantly monitor and seek to improve their practices. Quality improvement is a formal process of examining and improving performance through the analysis of data with the primary goal of enhancing patient care. Quality improvement activities in a nuclear medicine laboratory should emphasize accuracy and efficiency, patient and staff safety, and the patient's experience during care. Quality improvement in the nuclear medicine laboratory can potentially reduce the number of studies that need to be repeated because of poor quality, increase diagnostic accuracy, reduce radiation exposure, increase patient satisfaction, and save resources. This article will review the process of quality improvement; provide detailed, step-by-step instructions with special emphasis on project selection and data collection; and show examples of how to perform quality improvement projects.