Ryan Polselli

Dr. Ryan Polselli is a breast imaging radiologist with a passion for his profession and his patients. This site is primarily dedicated to issues related to breast cancer screening and diagnosis, although there is an occasional photo, post, or video related to Dr. Ryan Polselli and his personal life. Dr. Polselli believes there is an opportunity to reach out to patients through technology and that it should be embraced to meet the needs of the modern patient and health care system. That belief is in part what has motivated Dr. Polselli to work on blogging and in particular, this blog. Ryan Polselli is currently in practice full-time as a radiologist for Global Imaging Specialists, and is also the founder and CEO of MammoLink®. Dr. Polselli believes that the current health care delivery system in the United States is making it increasingly difficult to patients to feel in control of their own health care needs and patients are finding it increasingly difficult to navigate within the system. He says: If you want to have an idea of how just how ridiculously complicated our health care system has become, just take the example of breast cancer screening with mammograms. From a technical standpoint, a mammogram should be one of the easiest tests for patients to undergo in the field of medicine. The patient gowns, stands still for a few minutes, the breasts are compressed (albeit uncomfortably), and the image is obtained. It then takes a radiologist on average a few minutes to interpret the test. However, in reality the actual process by which a woman obtains a mammogram has become ridiculously complicated. Typically, the patient first schedules an appointment with her primary care or OB-Gyn physician, sometimes weeks out, often needing to take time off work. At the office, the patient pays a copay (often there is a complication with the insurance company and copay leaving the patient feeling helpless and frustrated) and spends an hour or so between transit time, filling out paperwork, and talking with the doctor. At the end of the visit, the patient is given a script for a screening mammogram. In the next several days, the patient is expected to call a second facility, typically a hospital or outpatient radiology facility. Again, an appointment is made, sometimes weeks in advance, and the patient must make the time in her schedule to visit a completely different facility. The appointment rarely is made outside working hours making it even more difficult. This process takes another hour or two, sometimes with a second copay and always with a second set of forms, most of which the patient already completed at her first visit. In the following days, the mammogram is read and a report is sent to the patient's doctor. Many doctors even still require the patient return to receive the results. At best, it takes several days between the time the report is completed by the radiologists, faxed back to the referring physicians office, placed in a chart to review, and call the patient with the results. 10 percent of the time, the patient is then recalled for additional images. If you were to design a screening process for patients today from the ground up, you would be hard-pressed to come up with a more inefficient, in-convenient, or frustrating system. I would like to see the day when there are standalone breast cancer screening facilities either along convenient routes or within doctors offices where no appointment, no script, no copay, and minimum paperwork is required and the results are immediately given to the patient with any additional imaging performed immediately. I would like to see the process take no more than 15 minutes from the time the patient walks in the door until the time the patient leaves. If we can do this, we will see compliance with screening skyrocket and more lives will be saved by early detection of breast cancer. This is the goal for MammoLink®