Elevating Radiologist Assistants in Modern Healthcare with Marcelene Forbus

Episode Overview

Episode Topic: In this episode of Skeleton Crew – The Rad Tech Show, we get into the specialized field of Interventional Radiology Studies, with Marcelene Forbus, a seasoned radiology practitioner assistant who owns Collaboration RA, offering a comprehensive exploration of its scope, educational pathways, and significant contributions to medical practice. She also provides invaluable insights into her journey and the transformative impacts of this discipline. The conversation aims to illuminate the lesser-known aspects of radiology, emphasizing the advancements and potential career opportunities available to aspiring professionals.

Lessons You’ll Learn: Listeners will gain an in-depth understanding of Interventional Radiology Studies through Marcelene’s personal and professional experiences. The conversation covers the critical skills required to excel in this field, the educational commitments involved, and the real-world applications of interventional techniques. Marcelene shares poignant stories from her career, illustrating how radiology professionals can significantly affect patient care and medical outcomes. The discussion also addresses the challenges and rewards of working in this high-stakes area of healthcare, providing listeners with a realistic view of the profession’s demands and satisfactions.

About Our Guests: Marcelene Forbus brings over two decades of experience in the field of radiology, currently serving as a Radiology Practitioner Assistant. Her career began as a radiologic technologist, where her exceptional skills and dedication led her to pursue advanced training in radiology. Marcelene is an advocate for education and collaboration within the industry and hosts her own podcast, “Collaboration RA,” which discusses trends, challenges, and innovations in radiology. Her insights are informed by years of hands-on experience and a deep commitment to improving patient care through advanced radiologic practices.

Topics Covered: Throughout the episode, we cover a wide array of topics relevant to Interventional Radiology Studies, including the role of radiology in modern medicine, the path to becoming a Radiology Practitioner Assistant, and the evolution of radiological education. Marcelene discusses the specifics of various radiology techniques, such as fluoroscopy and image-guided procedures, and their critical role in diagnostics and treatment. The conversation also touches on the importance of continuous learning and adaptability in the profession, the impact of technological advancements on radiology practices, and strategies for effective communication and collaboration within medical teams. Additionally, Marcelene provides insights into navigating the complexities of healthcare regulations and credentialing in radiology.

Our Guest: Marcelene Forbus–Advancing Healthcare with Interventional Radiology Studies

Episode Transcript

Marcelene Forbus: I want to be able to empower technologists, to be able to understand sometimes what we see on imaging and understanding the difference between emergent situations and non-emergent, and not necessarily to empower them to go on to a mid-level, but to be able to know what they’re looking at and have an in-depth understanding that there’s more than just pushing the button, which I think a lot of us have that common knowledge. But I think some of us don’t get that training. Especially, now, our radiologists don’t have the time to train technologists like what we used to see.

Jennifer Callahan: Welcome to the Skeleton Crew. I’m your host, Jen Callahan, a technologist with ten-plus years of experience. In each episode, we will explore the fast-paced, ever-changing suburbs, and the completely crazy field of radiology. We will speak to technologists from all different modalities about their careers and education, the educators and leaders who are shaping the field today, and the business executives whose innovations are paving the future of radiology. This episode is brought to you by xraytechnicianschools.com. If you’re considering a career in X-ray, visit xraytechnicianschools.com to explore schools and to get honest information on career paths, salaries, and degree options.Everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Skeleton-Crew. I’m your host, Jen Callahan, and tonight I have a great guest with me. Her name is Marcelene Forbus, and she is a radiologic technologist turned radiology practitioner assistant. She is also a podcast host of her own podcast called Collaboration RA. So I feel very honored that I have another podcast cohort with me tonight. Thank you so much, Marcelene, for being with me, I appreciate it.

Marcelene Forbus: Thank you so much for having me. Always happy to support another podcast and then, of course, collaborate together. So the more we can get out there about the industry, the better we are.

Jennifer Callahan: I agree totally. I’ve had a few different people on the show who are ride assistants, so it’s always interesting to get more information about this profession because it’s not widely talked about. To be honest, I feel like not up until like the past few years, that I even really know that it even existed personally myself. I feel kind of silly because I’ve been in the profession myself for over ten years at this point. So let’s first start talking about you a little bit. Can you tell us where you decided that you wanted to transition from being a rad tech and then pursue your way into this? Maybe even how did you even hear about the profession?

Marcelene Forbus: I was a technologist. I think I had been out of school for about 2 or 3 years, and my radiologist had approached me because I did a lot of fluoroscopy with them. So I caught on really quickly, asked me to go back to school to become a mid-level for them. They were very nonspecific. They kind of just used that term mid-level. My boss actually came up to me and said, “Why don’t you become a radiology practitioner assistant?” and kind of told me a little bit more about it and that it was an advancement of our X-ray background. So I kind of considered it. A lot of people were pushing me towards it in our department, and my grandfather had gotten sick and had open heart surgery and ended up with a toxic megacolon. our radiologist had spent a lot of time with us doing image review. If you’re an old-season tech, you know that we used to be the stat. We didn’t have anything. We were hanging films. So whenever I was visiting my grandpa and they had done the X-ray, I saw it and it was late in the evening and I knew that that was an emergency.

Marcelene Forbus: I let the technologist know and he said, somebody’s got to look at this, this is emergent. Unfortunately, it just wasn’t caught fast enough and I lost my grandpa. So I remember thinking to myself, I want to be able to empower technologists, to be able to understand sometimes what we see on imaging and understanding the difference between emergent situations and non-emergent, and not necessarily to empower them to go on to a mid-level, but to be able to know what they’re looking at and have an in-depth understanding that there’s more than just pushing the button, which I think a lot of us have that common knowledge. But I think some of us don’t get that training. Especially, now, our radiologists don’t have the time to train technologists like what we used to see. So that was what had me pursue it. That was about 17 years ago, and I haven’t looked back since. I love this career.

Jennifer Callahan: It’s a very sad story. I’m very sorry to hear about the way that your grandfather passed away, but it led you down a good path to where you currently are. You’re right about, as a technologist, being able to look at images. I mean, looking at images can be difficult. You can see a broken bone, sometimes easily, sometimes not so easily. But looking at things like abdomen images and even chest X-rays, you think that they might be cut and dry but they’re not. At this point, I don’t feel like there are very many radiologists out there who are like, “Come sit in my office with me and I’ll explain this to you.” Because there are shortages everywhere. Radiologists are bogged down with so many different exams that they’re reading and doing readings on. Then as a technologist yourself, you’re very busy. If you’re in a hospital bouncing between fluoro and portables and inpatients and understand everything that you said there. So you decided that you wanted to progress forward with your career there. I’ve heard that there are not many schools in the United States that do RA. It’s a master’s, correct. Is that what you end up getting?

Marcelene Forbus: It is. So you start out with your bachelor’s and then you progress through the program. When you graduate, you do graduate with your master’s.

Jennifer Callahan: Okay. So did you have a hard time finding a school for yourself to go to?

Marcelene Forbus: Currently, at the time that I went, it was only Weber State that was open. Right now, we have six programs. We have North Chapel Hill, we have Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, we have Midwestern State University here in Texas. You have Rutgers, you have Loma Linda, and then a missing one.

Jennifer Callahan: There’s Quinnipiac, I know.

Marcelene Forbus: Yes, there you go. Thank you.

Jennifer Callahan: I know that one just because two gentlemen that I’ve had that I’ve spoken to recently, both went to Quinnipiac.

Marcelene Forbus: There are six of them that offer it. As I said, usually, to get into the programs you have to in in 2025, it’s going to be two years minimum that you’ve been in the industry working as a technologist. You have to have a 3.0 GPA and then, of course, you have to have your bachelor’s to enter the program and then have a hospital agreement. So I always tell everybody there are affiliate agreements. You have to have an affiliate agreement between your radiologist and you, the hospital and you, and the university and you. Then the university needs one between the radiologist and you. So I always tell everybody that sometimes, can be the most challenging part, seeing who’s going to take on a student. Sometimes it takes a little bit of elbow grease and explaining what it is that we do because a lot of people don’t know what we do, and a lot of us are trying to get out there and educate about it, which is probably why either your listeners or yourself have been hearing more about it because we’ve been advocating more for ourselves.

Jennifer Callahan: It is kind of a quieter profession, I guess. I was looking on the collaboration RA’s website, and I like that at the very bottom, it shows by state how many RAs are in each state, I guess currently practicing or registered. I mean some states only have one RA, which is crazy. There are some states that have a good amount, I had written down, Texas, Florida, and Pennsylvania. I think Texas was the highest one. But some states have one, maybe two. It’s interesting because you guys seem useful. You make a big difference in the department in terms of helping out the radiologist and the things that they are in charge of, but could have someone else help them with and lessen their load, to be honest, I guess.

Marcelene Forbus: I agree with you 100%.

Jennifer Callahan: It’s kind of interesting that it’s not more popular or that there are not more programs out there for this.

Marcelene Forbus: One thing that I tell everybody in a lot of the most recent discussions that we’ve had is you guys have to remember that radiology is such a small unit, right? It’s not like other extenders that go out and they do all this broad spectrum within medicine. They go through family practice and they go through internal medicine and they go through all this extensive part. Now, our education is very similar. We take a lot of the same coursework. On top of that, we do our radiology coursework, and so on the JVIR, there’s an article that has a comparison side by side of PA and PNRA, and you’ll see there are striking similarities. The main difference is ours is all radiology-based. So you have to have those preceptorships and you have to have that. So you can’t put as many of us out there as what you typically would for those that go through all those other aspects of medicine, because we’re designed for radiology. So when we stress that our numbers are not going to grow to the numbers that you see other individuals out there, and that’s the reason for that. So we’ll always be smaller in numbers.

Jennifer Callahan: So you went to your program and that was located in Texas, correct?

Marcelene Forbus: The program I went to was in Utah. So I flew back and forth from Texas to Utah because you visit your campuses.

Jennifer Callahan: So you have to do the clinical work after. I guess, you do the didactic.

Marcelene Forbus: It depends on the program. So the one that I went to, it was a mixture of both. I worked full time, so I would do eight hours of my day unpaid and eight hours of my day paid. I did that five days a week, and then I had weekends off to study for like 17 hours a day. I think it’s like every five weeks to six weeks, I would fly to Utah and do my didactic there. Now we still did didactic at home, but it was kind of this hybrid didactic. Whenever you would go to the university, that’s when you would be taking some of your tests and presenting, and case studies. It was pretty rigorous. Education is pretty phenomenal.

Jennifer Callahan: It’s interesting how you said that you weren’t doing class and clinical hand in hand. Say, for instance, like when you went through your Rad tech program, I feel like three days a week, you were in the classroom, and the other two days you were at your clinical site. Then if you went through a two-year program, you flip-flop that way. So it’s interesting that you go, you learn, you take your tests, come out, I guess, do hands-on, then go back. It’s an interesting dynamic there.

Marcelene Forbus: It was. Took some time, getting used to, but you get through. It is just like anything else. I mean, I think for the most part you kind of think to yourself, like, what in the world did I sign up for? But then once you’re done and you get to do the work, I mean, I love this career. I absolutely love it.

Jennifer Callahan: The other areas that I’ve spoken to in the past have shared with me the different avenues of the path that you can go down in terms of how you’re going to practice. One gentleman I spoke to primarily worked in interventional radiology. Another gentleman kind of fluoro and IR and a bunch of different procedures. Where do you find yourself in the realm of that or how do you currently practice?

Marcelene Forbus: I do a mixture of both, but my primary is back in IR. I do some of the IR procedures. I do like Paracentesis, thyroid FNAs, or some of the superficial lymph node core biopsies, some of those more basic procedures, g-tube exchanges, and things like that. But a lot of what I do is decision fatigue for my radiologist. So they love me for that. We’ve had extensive talks about it here recently. But basically whenever we get an order and as I said, we’re high volume. But a lot of times I can sit back there. Actually, I stay back there all the time. So I don’t know why I said a lot of times. They get the freedom to be able to go back to the reading room and they can read some of the more routine studies or even catch up on the interventional studies that they performed. Then what I do is whenever we get an order, I’m able to look at, “Does the patient have prior imaging? What is their lab work? Are they on blood thinners?” I work them up with our nursing staff. That way whenever I go to present them, every case that we have, they’re not having to go through and make some of these thought processes.

Marcelene Forbus: I’m able to streamline it for them and kind of hand them a package that says, “Hey, here’s everything that we have. This was when our imaging was performed. The patient doesn’t have anything. They were transferred here. They’re asking us to do a biopsy. We have no imaging. I checked the chart. There’s no disc. What study would you recommend” Then I speak with the care team and then so forth and so on. One of the other interesting things is that our physician-to-physician communication went way up by the implementation of the RA, and some of the things that it went way up is, now, our radiologists have time to have these discussions with these physicians because now that I’ve condensed everything down for them, and we’ve taken a good 10, 15 minutes from their time having to look up these cases and go through all this back end stuff, they have that time to visit with the physicians. So all the way around, it just made things easier for them. They’re able to do these more high-end cases while I’m in the background, working up the next patient or consenting or visiting with family. It’s not that they don’t still get to do those things, but I’ve been able to answer a lot of questions that maybe didn’t have to be fielded through them, that even we as technologists could do.

Marcelene Forbus: So now they get to focus on the core questions or even just explaining, “This is the process that you’re going to go through today.” Our patients love it. So it’s been really good. A lot of our physicians are referring physicians. They know if they communicate with me, they will get a call back from our doctor. So if it’s something that’s not emergent, not trauma, and even our trauma team does communicate with me, they’ll give me a call and say, “Hey, Marcelene, got this patient upstairs. This is what I’m looking for. I can ask them, you know what? Have we worked up? Have we done an HRA on the patient? Have we done this?” Then as soon as I give it to my radiologist, they know my radiologist is going to call them back. I think that that’s pretty awesome and pretty unique and just kind of the way that we have our set up. I can’t speak for everybody else, but it’s made us successful and so it’s appreciated on all parts, my part, their part. So it’s a good team effort and our technologists love it.

Jennifer Callahan: This episode is brought to you by xraytech.org, the Rad Tech Career Resource. If you’re considering a career in radiology, check out xraytech.org to get honest information on schools, degree options, career paths, and salaries. So there are challenges though with every profession, especially, in the RA world, can you share a little bit of the challenges that you guys face in your profession?

Marcelene Forbus: I think, for us, and much like most of the radiology is recognition, I think that the RAs did a really good job at just kind of sitting back and thinking that we were progressing in a direction that we weren’t. So in hindsight, you kind of figure out like, okay, wait a second. We’re not moving where we thought we were. All of us kind of coming together and collectively saying, let’s educate a little bit better about who we are. Obviously, recognition is one of the things that we’re seeking with CMS and some of the other societies, and those are always ongoing discussions. Things are progressing in a very positive direction. There are a lot of times there are things that not everybody sees, and even me, that I’m not privy to, that our societies work towards. I think we’re moving in a more positive direction. I’m pretty hopeful that some of the more recent conversations are going to reflect that same positivity that everybody will see soon.

Jennifer Callahan: You had mentioned CMS, and for our listeners, if you’re not sure what that acronym stands for, it’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. On the website as well, you just mentioned it about being recognized by them. What does that exactly mean for the profession? I guess maybe if you are practicing within a hospital, does that have something to do with in terms of reimbursement for the hospital for procedures?

Marcelene Forbus: Reimbursement. So a lot of people get confused with CMS and being able to perform procedures. Those are two totally different things. The performance of procedures is done through your credentialing. what that means is whenever you’ve gone through the education, you’re able to go to a hospital and either say, “We have state licensure or we don’t. You don’t have to have state licensure, but you can go and show that you have the education, the clinical know-how, and that they’ve vetted through. CMS, for hospitals, does give By-Laws that all hospitals have to follow. The individuals are that to be working within the categories that they’re applying. So whenever you do get a credential at a hospital, the hospital has done its due diligence to make sure that, yes, they are putting somebody who’s educated and knowledgeable, that’s procedural side. Then you have the billing side and that’s where CMS comes in.

Marcelene Forbus: CMS can also determine your supervision levels to get reimbursed. It doesn’t mean that you have to perform the procedures that way at a hospital level if you’re not billing if that makes sense. So there’s all these different components to it that get sticky and involved. If anybody’s interested in that, happy to walk them through it. But what we are seeking is that CMS does recognize us as an entity or as an extender to our radiologist, where our radiologists get paid for the procedures that we perform. So we’re not there yet. I think that positively, that’s the direction that we’re moving. We currently don’t have what we call MARCA, Medicare Access to Radiology Care Act. Legislation that we’ve put in in the past, we don’t have that as of currently, but I’m hopeful that we’re on the horizon of seeing that come forward and hopefully, this time we can get it passed because it’s been 13, 14 years in the making, I think. At least since 2012, I believe that we’ve been working towards that. Again, I think it’s just been better educating. I think we’ve realized that.

Jennifer Callahan: Speaking of educating, you’ve been quite busy. You shared with me before we started recording that you’ve been here, there, and everywhere talking about the profession, which is great. You know, that you’re getting out there and sharing your love of the profession and doing some lecturing. Can you share a little bit about that? Who are you going and speaking for? You said that you’re going to be going across the pond to London soon.

Marcelene Forbus: That’s the plan. Not 100% sure if that one’s going to pan out. I know that I was invited and I accepted and we’ll see. But yes, I have been lecturing. It started out at a state level. I love to give CEUs, just recognition of our profession. Our societies do a phenomenal job and I just champion their processes. But yeah, I’ve been lecturing. It started out local and then it moved to state level here in Texas. Then it moved to other states like Louisiana, then I just got done doing one in California while I was actually in Las Vegas for our professional society. I lectured at AVIR, and I’m going to lecture at the AHRA, the other one that I’m looking to do, and as I said, don’t hold me to it, the BSIR is a goal of mine, and had that invite. So we’ll see if that one pans through. But moving from that state to national to international has been pretty phenomenal. That was not a goal of mine this year, but it sprouted itself. So I’m just going to go with it.

Jennifer Callahan: That’s great, congratulations.

Marcelene Forbus: Thank you.

Jennifer Callahan: Even if for some reason it doesn’t pan out, to receive the invitation alone, I feel like, is recognition for yourself and what you’re doing. So at these conferences, do you pick different topics that you’re talking about or do they suggest things that you talk about, or are you mainly talking about the profession?

Marcelene Forbus: It depends. One, I cater to the audience, so everybody in Texas has heard it. We do what’s called the RA-101, where we teach technologists what it takes to become an RA, how to go to that avenue, and who we are. A lot of RAs are giving those on every state level. Then the other one that I do is I want to make it relevant. I want people to be able to get their CEUs. So I kind of picked topics that are going to pique their interest. A lot of times I ask “What are a majority of your people that are coming? Are they CT techs? Are they mammographers?” Who are they and how can I interact with them?” I like to keep it more RA-focused, obviously, because that’s the line of work that I’m in. So at AVIR, we did more about how we work within the Radiology or Interventional Radiology setting, and how can we relate that to the technologists so that they can better understand my role so that I can show them who we are and that this is an avenue for them as well, too. It’s kind of different at the AHRA. That’s where we have a lot of our leadership. So it’s going to be about boots on the ground. How do the RAs contribute to our leadership? Because that’s huge too. We’re with their staff all the time when they don’t necessarily get that opportunity. I’m on the floor pretty much my entire shift. There are things that we see that take place that we’re able to bring back to our leadership and fine-tune things and build that team. So how do you tap into that? Well, here’s how we do it at my facility, just educating them on that, kind of catering to who is it we’re speaking to and how I play a role, that’s important and pertinent to them.

Jennifer Callahan: Another great thing that you’re doing, as I mentioned earlier, you are also a podcast host, which is great. Your co-host, Reece, is also an RA. How did you guys meet?

Marcelene Forbus: Reece was working with me. We work at one of the same facilities, and he was fairly new. At the time, the RAs were just really hitting this kind of low where we were trying to figure out “How do we educate about ourselves?” I made a joke and said, I’m going to start a podcast. Reece is like, “Great, let’s do it.” I was like, “Ah, that was a joke.” Reece was like, “Nope, we’re going to do it.” Surprisingly enough, I work with a radiologist. His name is Doctor Aaron Fritz, and he runs the B podcast for IR. I didn’t know he did a podcast. I was like, hey, I don’t even listen to podcasts. He’s like, oh my gosh, let me help you. I have to pay a lot of credit, kudos to him because he kind of helped us out and he’s really pushed us, and he’s been a great advocate for the RA and spoke with us at the AVIR and phenomenal Physician and just this phenomenal person. So I guess God’s just put me on the right path everywhere that I ended up, whether I wanted to be there or not.

Jennifer Callahan: But you and Reece have been doing the podcast now for a little bit, almost like two years, I think, right?

Marcelene Forbus: Like around three. We’re celebrating three. We just started our third year.

Jennifer Callahan: I’m sure you never thought that you’d be three years in.

Marcelene Forbus: Hair got grayer. That’s what it does to you. So watch out.

Jennifer Callahan: On your podcast, are there any notable people that you’ve had that you’d like to highlight possibly or any notable conversations that you can think of?

Marcelene Forbus: We’ve had so many amazing ones. We got to visit with the ASRT’s CEO, Melissa Pergola, and Brandon Smith, the president of the ASRT. We’ve had Dave Hardwick, who’s the president of the SRP. Jason Barrett, who set forth a lot of these advocacy efforts with the RA. We’ve had Terry Licciardi on, who’s chair of the CBRPA. I mean, a lot of conversations we’ve had our radiologist on. I can’t pick one because every single person brings something unique and individual. If you really just listen to them, as you and I were talking earlier, there are key aspects that you can relate to. So those have definitely been a highlight. One of my favorite things about the podcast, and it’s at the beginning of my slide, at every single CEU lecture I do is all the different ways that we can advance in radiology. So every single person, we visited with the AHRA and being able to have these certified radiology administrators not even know that that’s an avenue for us on top of everything else, I’m currently studying for that. So it’s just so many things. Everybody brings something new that I’m like, oh my gosh, we can do that. Radiology has just put ourselves in a box and tied a little bow on it. we have to open that package up because there are just so many ways we can advance.

Jennifer Callahan: I agree, and I feel like the knowledge isn’t shared enough. I mean, at least in your initial education, in terms of graduating from a Rad tech program. I feel like you kind of go to school and maybe now in programs that you said in Texas, talk about being an RA, but I feel like the main things talked about are just progressing from one modality to another. They don’t talk about what’s beyond that. What other professions in radiology can you get into? So I think that’s great that you share that knowledge. People find themselves 10 or 15 years in. Either one working in X-ray or two have progressed on to another modality. But there’s something else that they want to do, but they still want to stay within the field. They might do a Google search because everyone Googles, right? You’re not going to come up with information like that. Or you go and try to apply for another job. like you said, you’re kind of put in a box, a little bow, and you’re a rad tech and they see that you’ve worked in a hospital and kind of like, oh, where can I go? So I love that you share knowledge of what else you can do in the world of radiology.

Marcelene Forbus: I should probably post it on our website. That way people can look. The seminars bring amazing things. I think it’s just, as I said, thinking outside of ourselves, but also at the same time, self-recognition. Radiology lacks that. As individuals, we kind of do this whole, I feel like we’re disrespected and it’s kind of like, okay, but you, you speak what you get. What you were saying, what you put out there is what you’re going to receive. I think it’s time for us to kind of transition from that, and I’m guilty of it too, transition from that and say, no, I’m a worthy profession. I am respected and let me tell you why and start defending ourselves instead of still dwelling on that where we were at.

Jennifer Callahan: Speaking of that, going from where we’re at then, where do you think that the RA profession might be in the next ten years? What are your hopes and dreams for it?

Marcelene Forbus: To be honest with you, I think if you had asked me this question even three years ago, I probably couldn’t have given you as well of an answer. But just in the past two years, getting to see the conversations change from a more negative one, where we faced a lot more opposition to now we’re getting a lot more support, not only from the technologists and other RAs themselves, but also radiologists, and starting to see the value in the work that we do and those that work with us now feeling like they can speak more towards what it is that we actually do. So you’re seeing this shift from more of a negative aspect to truly understanding who we are. That comes from honest, transparent conversations, which I think we should have had years ago. But here we are today. I think progressing and looking at ten years down the line where I would like to see us, I mean, of course, I can’t see the future, but I hope that we do have that recognition and I think that we will. I think that a lot of people are going to see similar to the anesthesia assistant, where they just got their recognition and they’ve been doing it for 50 years, but we’re very alike to them. So I see us progressing that way, where we’re still working under the supervision of a radiologist, but we’re able to be able to have the services that we’re currently performing, having our radiologists be able to bill for them. So I think that’s the key factor.

Jennifer Callahan: I do want to bring up this one thing before we sign off. So in the RA profession, there are two different roles. So you were a Radiology Practitioner Assistant, correct? But then there is also the Radiologist Assistant. Is there a difference between the two?

Marcelene Forbus: The difference is governing bodies. So you have the radiology practitioner assistant or RPA that has the governing body of the Certification Board for Radiology Practitioner Assistants. Then you have the RRA, which is the Registered Radiologist Assistant that the ARRT is over, and credentials. Many years ago we decided to come together and collaborate together. So about in 2010, we all took on the common name Radiologist Assistant. All of us follow kind of the same scope of practice. When your state law puts it in, we all adhere to the same rules and things like that. I always tell people, don’t let the two names confuse you. You can have a dual certification. There are radiologist assistant programs, like we said, six of them. We all follow the same rules. So the older generation such as myself and then we got our newer generations that come in. I tell everybody, don’t get hung up on that. It’s confusing. We’ve made it confusing. We get that. That was where we came together in 2010.

Jennifer Callahan: That’s good. I was a little confused before we started talking this evening wondering that. But I mean, it makes total sense that you guys are just forming into one. Well, thank you, Marcelene, so much for chatting with me tonight. I enjoyed our conversation and giving more information about this wonderful profession that’s out there for anyone who’s looking to advance their career, so I appreciate it.

Marcelene Forbus: I’m always happy to support you if you ever need anything or you ever want to come on our podcast too.

Jennifer Callahan: I would love to.

Marcelene Forbus: Always happy to have you.

Jennifer Callahan: All right. Everybody, I’m Jen Callahan, and my guest with me this evening, Marcelene Forbus, sharing with us about the radiology assistant profession out there. So keep your ears out. If you ever see anything, I guess petition-wise in terms of the CMS and for them to be recognized, pay attention to it because it’s really important for the radiology world. Everybody, we’ll see you later. Thanks again.

Marcelene Forbus: Thank you.

Jennifer Callahan: You’ve been listening to the Skeleton-Crew, brought to you by xraytech.org, the Rad Tech Career Resource. Join us on the next episode to explore the present and the future of the Rad Tech career and the field of radiology.