Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Outsourcing Illness Diagnoses

The Seattle Times reports radiologists in Australia, India, Israel and Lebanon are reading scans on U.S. patients spurred by a shortage of U.S. radiologists and an exploding demand for more sophisticated scans to diagnose scores of ailments.

Despite some doctors' fears, advocates say outsourcing radiology is nothing like the nightmarish vision of seedy sweatshops stealing U.S. jobs and replacing them with unqualified cheap labor. Most of the doctors are U.S.-trained and licensed, although there is at least one experiment using radiologists without U.S. training.

Dr. David Turner, chairman of diagnostic radiology and nuclear medicine at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, believes outsourcing fears are unfounded. With concern about medical errors and malpractice lawsuits, no U.S. hospital would risk hiring poorly trained doctors, he said. "The bottom line is this is not outsourcing in the sense that automobile jobs are going to Mexico and call center jobs are going to India," Turner said. "It's something on a different level."

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