Leveraging the electronic health record to evaluate the validity of the current RVU system for radiologists

Abstract Background Relative value units (RVUs) are utilized to evaluate physician productivity in many fields, including radiology. The goal of this paper is to use the electronic medical record (EMR) to evaluate whether the current RVU system allows for fair comparison between radiologists' time effort. Materials and methods The study was approved by the local Institutional Review Board (IRB). Over 600,000 radiology studies with unique current procedural terminology (CPT) codes were evaluated, and after exclusion of studies interpreted in conjunction with trainees or interpreted using other software systems, a total of 241,627 studies remained. The median 25%ile, 50%ile, 65%ile, 75%ile and modal study ascribable times (SATs) for each CPT code was calculated across all radiologists. To evaluate the potential bias incurred using the current RVU system, the number of days required to achieve the Association of Administrators in Academic Radiology AAARAD 65%ile were calculated. Results RVU values were positively correlated with SATs (r = 0.69–0.71, p  Conclusion The current RVU system is not strongly correlated with radiologist effort measured by radiologists' time. A time-based metric is more representative of radiologist work. However, there is no perfect method to measure radiologists' work.