Rethinking Peer Review: What Aviation Can Teach Radiology about Performance Improvement.

摘要

Since the mid-20th century, aviation has been transformed from a relatively high-risk human endeavor into the extremely low-risk enterprise that it is today. During the past 20 years, fatal accidents occurred in fewer than one in every 4.5 million departures and in fewer than one in 9 million since 2001 (1). The risk of dying in an airline accident is now infinitesimal. Equipment improvement accounts for some of that record, but the primary driver was the ability of aviation to learn rapidly from its mistakes for the improvement of performance-especially human performance (2). While radiology is one of the most technologically advanced medical specialties, like most of the medical field, it is a relative newcomer to the science of human performance improvement (3). Radiology can learn relatively cheaply, quickly, and effectively from the experience of those in aviation-a field that has paid for its knowledge in terms of lives lost as well as dollars spent.