Moving into 2024 and Our Future

Dmitry D. Beyder

What an incredible time for nuclear medicine and molecular imaging, with nuclear medicine imaging seeing a resurgence, PET growing at a stratospheric pace, and theranostics being adopted and used for various patient treatments internationally. Thank you, members and nuclear medicine professionals, for voting for me to be your president during this exciting time! I am eager to work with the SNMMI leadership team, committee members, SNMMI staff, and all of you to deliver on my promises and set up nuclear medicine technologists for future success.

Dmitry Beyder, MPA, CNMT

In 2023, with Krystle Glasgow as Technologist Section president, we started working on a significant part of the platform I ran under in 2022: empowering the nuclear medicine technologist (NMT) to play a pivotal role in all components of theranostics. With Krystle’s work, we are working to launch an NMT Therapy Boot Camp in early 2024 that will allow practicing NMTs to gain more therapy skills to support authorized users in radiopharmaceutical therapy practice.

As I was sworn in as the SNMMI Technologist Section president in June, my additional goals for the next 12 months included establishing formal theranostics education; continuing to put energy, resources, and ingenuity into developing the NMT workforce pipeline; and increasing our global collaboration with other NMT professional associations worldwide.

Theranostics Education

With eyes on the resurgence of the Nuclear Medicine Advanced Associate (NMAA) program in 2025, our goal is to provide NMTs with formal and complete training in theranostics. This includes working up patients for treatment, collecting and addressing their vitals, understanding their therapy history, and making therapy decisions with that in mind. It includes working and charting appropriately within the electronic medical record, ordering labs, and evaluating lab work and other diagnostic testing. It also includes working closely with an authorized user to administer the therapy radiopharmaceutical along with appropriate adjunctive medications such as amino acids.

NMT Workforce Pipeline

During the past year, we embarked on a thorough and professional evaluation of practicing and certified NMTs throughout the United States. Based on various data that we evaluated, with a forecasted increase in demand for theranostics services and traditional nuclear medicine over the next 5 years, we could see a 15%–25% shortfall in the number of professional NMTs available to take care of our patients; this is a problem that we are working hard to address. We collected and are now analyzing survey data that will allow us to fine-tune our plan to put support and financial resources in place that will stimulate the development of new NMTs. We will continue to support NMT educational programs throughout the United States. During the 2023 SNMMI Annual Meeting in Chicago, we launched our first-ever Student Leadership Academy and our first-ever program to stimulate interest in nuclear medicine technology among high school students; both of these events were huge successes! We will continue to build on those successes and to increase both the quantity and quality of new technologists entering our field.

Global Collaboration

We will also continue to focus attention on international collaboration throughout the world, including Europe, Australia, Africa, and beyond. We are working on defining and establishing a global role in therapy for the NMT, which will help us move the NMT profession forward on a global scale.

Our 2023 Strategic Plan specifically calls for collaborative work among physicians, scientists, and technologists. In continuous collaboration with Dr. Helen Nadel, current president of SNMMI, and with our other SNMMI partners, we will advance the profession as a whole, working together to accomplish many priorities and initiatives and taking care of the entire SNMMI membership.

The SNMMI Technologist Section elected leadership have a full slate of initiatives in place for the coming year. Julie Bolin, president-elect, and Krystle, immediate past president, will join me in exploring and implementing innovative ideas to position our membership for a wonderful and bright future. Thank you for your help and support!