June 20, 2011 | 11:17 AM |

Overuse of Chest CT Scans: The Massachusetts Story

FILED UNDER: Medicine/Science, Beth Israel Needham, CT scans, radiation

Double scanning CT patients: Beth Israel Hospital in Needham is nearly three times the national average, according to The Times

A big investigation in The New York Times over the weekend documents the outrageous overuse of CT scans by medical providers. The report found that “hundreds of hospitals across the country needlessly exposed patients to radiation by scanning their chests twice on the same day, according to federal records and interviews with researchers.”

The excellent interactive map accompanying the story allows you to search by state to see whether your favorite hospital is double scanning. In Massachusetts, according to the The Times map, most of the hospitals are well below the national average for double scanning, which is 5.4%. That is all but one: in 2008, at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Needham, 16% of chest CT scan patients (203 patients in total) were scanned twice in the same day.

About the author

Blogger, CommonHealth Rachel Zimmerman worked as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal for 10 years, most recently covering health and medicine out of the paper’s Boston bureau. Rachel has also written for The New York Times, the (now-defunct) Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the alternative newspaper Willamette Week, in Portland, Ore., among other publications. Rachel co-wrote a book about birth, published by Bantam/Random House, and spent 2008 as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Rachel lives in Cambridge with her husband and two daughters. View all posts by Rachel Zimmerman →