A Student Perspective on a Data Acquisition Project

As nuclear medicine technology students, we occasionally encounter opportunities to gain experience outside the classroom and away from the clinical setting. We recently received an opportunity to assist a nuclear medicine physician at the University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital in conducting a survey on hepatobiliary iminodiacetic acid (HIDA) scanning. The same survey had been conducted about 4 years previously, before the most recent (2010) procedure guideline on HIDA scanning had been published by the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging. The physician wanted to repeat the survey and compare the results with the previous results to see if the updated guideline had altered clinical practice in Alabama. Our task was to contact all nuclear medicine sites, such as hospitals and outpatient facilities, in Alabama and ask about aspects of their HIDA protocol such as patient preparation, the fatty meal used, and the dose and duration of cholecystokinin infusion. The survey results will be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

As senior students in the nuclear technology program, we have enough knowledge at this point to have a good understanding of the procedure for HIDA scans. We understand important study variables such as how to determine the appropriate cholecystokinin dose, how to administer the cholecystokinin, and how to correctly position the patient. Having several months of clinical experience, we realize that each facility has its own way of performing the various nuclear medicine examinations. Most sites were helpful in assisting with the survey, and we found it interesting to hear about the different types of HIDA protocols that are used by different clinics. However, once we began calling facilities, it became evident that this project was not going to be as simple as we originally thought. What we expected to take a week or two actually took about 4 weeks. Not only did we have to balance our class and clinic schedules, but we also had to schedule enough time to call each facility—time not just to perform the interview but to first maneuver through the maze of phone connections just to reach the nuclear medicine department.

We frequently became discouraged when we could not reach certain technologists either because they were with a patient or because they had gone home by the time our classes or clinic shift ended and we finally had a chance to place the calls. It became important for us to remind ourselves of what we were doing—participating in an information-gathering project. We coined a mnemonic, P-R-O-J-E-C-T, to help bolster our diligence as we worked our way through contacting the over 70 nuclear medicine departments across Alabama: