Cincinnati Children’s Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory ranks in the nation’s top percentile for the low amount of radiation used during its catheterization procedures.

Radiation reduction has long been a focus of this team. From 2014 to present, they have lowered the amount of radiation used three-fold while maintaining the quality needed to perform a successful diagnostic procedure.

Russel Hirsch, MD, director of the Cardiac Catheterization Lab, says decreasing radiation requires having the best equipment that produces the lowest radiation, and knowing how to manipulate that equipment to further decrease the amount of radiation exposure.

“We are exposing patients to less radiation despite the fact that our cases are getting longer and more complicated, and our patients are undergoing more procedures involving radiation,” says Hirsch.

His team puts significant effort into keeping radiation doses down, starting with a radiation reduction committee that meets regularly to study results, discuss improvements and maintain the gains achieved thus far. Their goal is the least amount of radiation exposure possible for both patients and employees.

Data collection and analysis plays a critical role in this effort, with one team member dedicated to collecting and collating radiation data. This information is then contributed to a registry that allows the team to compare and contrast radiation exposure with other medical centers nationwide. “We were part of the initial group that set the benchmarks, and then we exceeded them,” Hirsch says.

Those criteria include guidelines stating that a certain level of radiation exposure will be met in cath procedures 95 percent of the time or more. That means the Cardiac Cath Lab team can tell parents with the utmost confidence that their children will be exposed to the lowest amount of radiation possible.

This goal-oriented team aims to continue to achieve the lowest radiation with the best image quality. Says Hirsch, “The Holy Grail is to find that balance, that point where we have decreased the radiation dose sufficiently while maintaining the image quality needed to get the results we need.”