Global Impact of Continuing Education in Radiology with Roy Khodr

Episode Overview

Episode Topic: In this episode of Skeleton Crew – The Rad Tech Show, we get into the training of medical professionals with Roy Khodr, President of Medical Professionals. This episode focuses on the importance of continuing education and the necessity of earning CE credits to stay compliant and knowledgeable in the field. Roy Khodr explains how Medical Professionals is dedicated to providing high-quality educational resources, from webinars to advanced e-learning courses, all designed to ensure that radiologic technologists and other medical professionals are up-to-date with the latest advancements and best practices in medical imaging and radiology.

Lessons You’ll Learn: Listeners will gain valuable insights into the training of medical professionals, especially within the context of radiology. Roy Khodr discusses the critical role that continuing education plays in maintaining high standards of patient care and safety. He also shares the innovative methods Medical Professionals employs, such as interactive 3D animated guides and expert-led webinars, to make learning more engaging and effective. This episode underscores the importance of staying current with technological advancements and the practical application of new knowledge in clinical settings, helping professionals bridge the gap between training and real-world application.

About Our Guests: Roy Khodr, the President of Medical Professionals, brings a wealth of experience and expertise to the discussion on the training of medical professionals. With a background that includes working with major equipment manufacturers like GE and Siemens, Roy has a deep understanding of the challenges and needs in medical training. Under his leadership, Medical Professionals has expanded its reach, providing comprehensive continuing education to radiologic technologists and other healthcare providers worldwide. His commitment to improving patient outcomes through better training and education is evident throughout the conversation, making him an authority on the subject.

Topics Covered: Throughout the episode, we cover a wide range of topics related to the training of medical professionals. Key points include the importance of CE credits and the process of obtaining accreditation for educational courses. Roy Khodr discusses the diverse range of educational formats offered by Medical Professionals, including free webinars, interactive e-learning modules, and downloadable PDF guides. Additionally, the conversation touches on the rapid advancements in medical technology and the need for continuous learning to keep pace with these changes. Listeners will also hear about real-world anecdotes and the practical benefits of having a well-trained workforce in radiology and medical imaging.

Our Guest: Roy Khodr– Enhancing Healthcare by Training of Medical Professionals

Episode Transcript

Jennifer Callahan: Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of The Skeleton-Crew. I’m your host, Jen Callahan, and today I have a guest with me. His name is Roy. He is the president of Medical Professionals and Medical Professionals located in France. This is a continuing education company. So we’re switching roles from being in the clinical and talking about AI, and we’re talking about a portion that all of us or anyone that is working within radiology knows that you have to do, at least in America that you have to do your continuing education credits and you have to turn those in every two years for your biennium. So this is a pertinent conversation for us currently who are in the field and practicing in radiology. So Roy, thanks for being with me today.

Roy Khodr: Thank you, Jen, for taking the time to meet with us and to address the radiology continuing education subject.

Jennifer Callahan: Sure. So talk to me a little bit about medical professionals. So you have webinars, and you have CE credits, and I also too, saw on the website that you’re doing something with, the CQR compliance test that’s out there currently.

Roy Khodr: If you don’t mind, I’ll make a long story short a little bit. I’ll go back to the history of the company before we get to the continuing education part, because it’s important from that perspective as we position today as a company, when you want to be more than just certified, choose medical professionals. That takes me back to the inception of the company when it started back then, in 2002. The founder of the company is Hisham Al-Azzam, who used prior to creating his own company, Medical Professionals. He was 21 years old with GE, and in his last position, he was general manager for Middle East Africa and GE Healthcare. One of the frustrations he faced during his term was he was able to deliver the most pertinent equipment and state-of-the-art equipment. However, he felt that most of the users are not using the machines up to their optimal usage. So he felt the need for training out there and somewhere this is affecting the patient behind the scenes. Because if we don’t use the equipment properly, that would affect the diagnosis and the treatment behind it. This is how the company started, where we started by conducting clinical applications on the equipment, and supporting manufacturers back then. Fast-forwarding, and throughout the application, I can tell you that we’ve been to 72 different countries. So based on our statistics, our application specialist set foot in these countries and trained people on the equipment, multi-modality, I mean, CT, MRI, mammal radiation therapy, nuclear medicine, you name it, all the medical imaging. One of the stories that changed as well, the evolution of the company was one of the application specialists coming back to the management and saying, you guys said you should go out there and make sure that you’re making a difference in the training that you’re providing.

Roy Khodr: We’re making a difference in many cases. In many cases, we’re not, or making little. The idea was they were training people who had a certain gap between the technology, how fast it moved, and their education. He said, whatever we’re providing in five days, it’s too much information. Very advanced to the point that they can’t digest it in five days. I don’t know what to do and how to do it, but I guess there’s something to be done over here if we want to be 100% efficient, and if we want to be making a difference out there, that led somehow to creating the training materials, which I don’t call back then we didn’t call continuing education. We were not out of the continuing education business, but we created some training materials that would be helpful as complementary to the application training and ensure that we’re making a difference out there. Fast forwarding today we have two business lines. We have the application business where we provide application support through different manufacturers, among others Siemens, Samsung Canon, and other major equipment manufacturers. We worked with GE for 17 years as well. And continuing education on the other side of the equation today we have one of the most diverse libraries of continuing education. It’s approved by the ASRT and fulfills the requirements of CE and CQR requirements for lab techs for Sonographers as well. Those will require ARDMS certification.

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.

Roy Khodr: But most importantly, we went beyond just providing credits. We provide continuing education, and the content material that we provide out there comes with accreditation, but people will learn something from it. We have a variety of courses that cover Multi-modality on one end. The content is very rich, coming from real expertise from the ground after all these years of experience. We’re still on the ground providing this experience. And it has several formats catering to different tastes. It has a video format led by an expert explaining. We have webinars that are free. All the webinars we do are free credits. We have a format that has a PDF downloadable transcript for those who prefer to read. We have an interactive format that has animations as well, where you can move at your own pace. At the end of the day, whatever we developed, we developed it in a manner to be very frank leaving nothing for reasoning explicitly explained with animations and designs behind it. It’s all catered designed and developed in-house.

Jennifer Callahan: I was watching some of the videos with the 3D animation and they’re very lifelike. I mean, it’s a skeleton nonetheless. It’s not a person, but it’s interesting to see and very helpful for visualization purposes especially if it was a student who might be looking at these so you can see the body part. I mean, sometimes trying to visualize where T7 is on the back is kind of difficult. You can use landmarks, but looking at the skeleton going up against the chest pocket is helpful where they can visualize where the scapula is because that’s generally around the area of where T7 is. But I did want to go back to what you had mentioned about how the company first came into inception by doing the training for the different equipment out there. I have to agree that you have applications come in from whoever the vendor is, say, Siemens or Kodak or whoever, and you have these like two days where you have to digest all this information about this new equipment that you have, and then you’re kind of like left and you’re hoping that you remember everything.

Jennifer Callahan: At least, I’m a big note-taker, so I’m trying to take down as many notes as I can. Someone is usually dubbed as a super user. So this person is supposed to be like you go to them if you have a question about anything. And then how you said that, like, the equipment is possibly not being used properly or used to the best capability. I feel like a lot of times that comes from. So if, for instance, like myself, I was just trained on something but then we have someone who comes in and they’re hired like four months after we just do this training. Well, now I’m expected to train this person on this equipment, so. Exactly. Almost like a whisper down the lane type of situation that I’m sharing as much information that I feel like I know and I remember, and now I have to share it with them. It’s they have to digest that information so I can understand the frustration and how the company came to fruition.

Roy Khodr: Yes, absolutely. That’s part of the past. At any rate, tech has to go through in terms of continuing education where they get the information accessible anytime, anywhere. In a reference library, somehow, regardless of the manufacturer. It can be as continuing education not related to a specific machine, but it puts the knowledge out there.

Jennifer Callahan: Even I have to say the manuals that some of this equipment is they have to be decoded almost so sometimes you go, you feel like, oh, I’ll just refer to the manual and see if my question can be answered within there. Sometimes it’s not or it’s very I think.

Roy Khodr: Nothing is better than a red tech to a red tech training, sharing information between red tech, a more trained one, or a more experienced one to other colleagues. That makes a hell of a difference. You got a lot of different types of training. But at the end of the day, if I have a red tech in front of me, you would understand exactly what I’m trying to achieve over here. And the frustrations we might face as latex or the latex might face another attack. They will understand exactly what they are looking for and the type of information they are trying to decrypt.

Jennifer Callahan: Right. I feel like technology in the past ten years at least even the past 20 years has grown exponentially. Is it difficult for the company to keep up with the growing technology and the new equipment that’s out there, I guess, in terms of developing, and continuing education?

Roy Khodr: Our relationships as the team of applications that we have on-site are trained directly by the manufacturer on the latest equipment and latest options. That’s one course of being up to date on the new technology that’s coming out. So before it comes on the market, we’re trained to go and train people. Definitely. We’re not trained on all the different types of equipment out there. But in most cases, all the major manufacturers we are, and then again, by transferring this information to lab techs, you would develop a pedagogy behind it where you can tailor it in a certain manner to communicate that information, mind you, as well, all the major congresses in radiology, which we go to our product managers or application specialists or the consultants we work with they are up to date from that point of view, by following all the scientific and associations and all the technology or the techniques that’s coming up. You’ve got the ECR, the RSNA, the ASNR, the Congress, several Congresses, and in France as well worldwide.

Jennifer Callahan: Have you seen major advancements in technology and with these different uses of the RSNA and the ASRT, like different conferences? So you’re just gathering as much information as you can so that you’re making sure that the company is on top of the current developments.

Roy Khodr: Technology is moving quite fast at its pace especially being on the ground not professors only behind their desks, but being on the ground, working on the equipment, working with other red techs. That makes the practical aspects of our courses efficient. Whenever even delivered e-learning explicitly with some animations would communicate this information quite easily. And to the most advanced new technologies coming up.

Jennifer Callahan: So you guys are located in France and then do you also have a headquarters in the United States?

Roy Khodr: Effectively we’re located in France, our operations. And we have another office located in Beirut. So our physical operations for all the applications are around Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. We don’t have application training in the US, but our presence in the US is mostly online with our accredited e-learning courses.

Jennifer Callahan: So talking about the accredited courses when you’re developing new courses, I assume that you have to submit those to the ASRT to make sure that the credits would be approved.

Roy Khodr: Definitely. There is a hell of a process behind it. We do get the accreditation when it comes to the English courses from the American Society of Radiologic Technologists. We have another accrediting body in France for the French courses that we go through. There is kind of a different process that we have to abide by. We’ve got we’ve developed processes even before getting into accreditation way back then where when we ever got the accreditation, wouldn’t feel a difference because we had the processes in place. These processes help us maintain our quality, which comes from the content development and the clinical expertise, up to making it in an animated manner available on the website. Today, the way we’re organized we have our clinical expertise with the application specialist or the pool of consultants, mainly us radiologic technologists or French radiologic technologists who are experts in certain university hospitals or private clinics or what have you. This is the clinical content that we have. We have on the other side, we have the designers and developers who are supposed to transform all this clinical knowledge into an easy-to-follow type of format, and between, we have our own product managers who ensure that the encryption and the communication between the clinician and the creative work as well, that consists of the creation of the content. Then you have another cycle that goes behind that in terms of validation, validating layout, validating content, validating typos, and validating of every single aspect. At animations, what have you? And the last step would be to submit for accreditation. That’s another validation and review that we get from the association.

Jennifer Callahan: Now in terms of submitting for accreditation, continuing education always is a sign like this is worth 1.5 CE credits, 3 CE credits. Does the ASRT, are they the ones that tell you how many credits you’re allowed to say that it’s worth? Or do you submit and say we would like to have it valued at this amount?

Roy Khodr: They have specific processes or procedures in which they define how they quantify the number of C credits for a course whether based on the voiceover, the video length, the number of characters, and other criteria. So we, ahead of time, understand these regulations and procedures and we estimate how many credits we have submitted with our estimation by the end of the day is ASRT, which defines the number of credits that we provide.

Jennifer Callahan: Okay. All right. Then the webinars, how long, in length, are they? Sorry, I couldn’t get that out.

Roy Khodr: We typically do it between an hour to two hours maximum. So it’s 1 to 2 CE credits. We try to locate it either at lunchtime or after working hours before the latex gets home or the minute, they get home. So we do it 1 to 2 CE credits live.

Jennifer Callahan: Okay. Lives. That’s cool. And who are the people who are presenting in those? Are they like technologists themselves or maybe doctors?

Roy Khodr: Do you mean the trainers or the attendees?

Jennifer Callahan: Yes, the trainers, I guess.

Roy Khodr: The trainers are usually our consultants and the kind of scientific committee that we have in the US. So the trainers we work with in terms of the development of the courses or delivering the courses are either professors working in universities in the US or working in an establishment in university hospitals or hospitals, or private clinics in the US. So they are people who have been in this field for so long. We had a relationship in terms of developing this content.

Jennifer Callahan: Okay. All right. Great.

Roy Khodr: So we always rely on Vertex, frankly, for delivering red-tech content.

Jennifer Callahan: Is there a question-answer forum at the end of the presentation?

Roy Khodr: That is all in between. It’s not a requirement. We just happen to have a question on the customer service support about this. That’s not a requirement. The polls or the questions for live webinars, live webinar, you would need to attend it completely. That’s the requirement for it to enable you to get your certificate. But we ensure in there that we have at several checkpoints, some polls and the polls would ensure a certain interactivity to see how the attendees are grasping the information. Are they getting it correct or incorrect? That would tell also the trainer as he managed to get the information across. All of there is a lack of in certain areas where he needs to talk about it, and that would also open up a certain exchange for people who want to have to ask questions. We try to make it as much as possible interactive with the trainer.

Jennifer Callahan: I know because sometimes sitting down and just listening to something for like an hour can be so monotonous. You’re interested, but then all of a sudden you might find yourself just staring off into space and thinking about something. Absolutely. So actually, I mean, I remember taking like three-hour courses in college, and that’s kind of how I found myself. But that can even happen in just an hour.

Roy Khodr: Three hours takes about a half an hour nap in between.

Jennifer Callahan: Yes. Do you find certain topics more popular for the CE credits that are purchased or more popular topics for the webinars?

Roy Khodr: From our statistics, we figure that by the law itself of statistics, there are more X-ray red techs than other CT, MRI specialty, or ultrasound. So that makes it more popular. The X-ray topics more than anything else. Just by the fact that the population of X-ray red tech is more dense. They are more red tech X-rays than other specialties. But we find a lot of people are interested mostly in X-ray and MRI more than the other modalities of scans. There is a huge also as well in terms of interest in it. But we always see MRI and X-ray in the top two.

Jennifer Callahan: Okay. All right. And then do you do different topics within those brackets, but maybe something like being for X-ray? Like if you work in an emergency room you see some quite interesting things you talk about crazy things that can happen in X-rays. Just to spice up the conversation of X-ray, not talking about, like, imaging or chest X-ray or do you know what I’m trying to say?

Roy Khodr: I guess, especially in an emergency, we see such types of things. We ran a test in France with different red techs and we called it anecdotes. Each red tech in about, let’s say, 40 to 50s. He would tell us about his story a bizarre story of a patient who came to the hospital. Some of them not necessarily are bizarre, but but are awkward, let’s say. Or out of the blue. These are nice kinds of exchange that that they have but. It’s critical sometimes to publish all of these anecdotes.

Jennifer Callahan: Yes. You giggle sometimes after something happens and not to say giggle for those of you who might be listening but aren’t working in healthcare. But I mean, after a while, you know you’re working in it and it’s almost become like you become numb to some situations and a good and a bad way. But then sometimes you look back at a situation and you’re like, geez, that was crazy. I can’t believe that happened. It might. It’s not even like, say, like a patient, like going like crazy, like fighting with you or something, but maybe just. All of a sudden, the patient comes into the room and they’re fine, and then all of a sudden they’re coding just out of the blue, and you have to call overhead for this. Someone comes running in and like, you just think about it and you sit back and nothing about that is funny at all. But at the moment you’re living it and it’s okay, and then you sit back after the fact and you’re like, geez, what happened here? I can understand what they’re saying with that.

Roy Khodr: One of the stories that we got that and that’s one of our own employees when she used to work at a hospital, she got a patient on the table. Supposedly, he was dead three hours ago.

Jennifer Callahan: Dead? Three hours ago?

Roy Khodr: But effectively, he wasn’t. There’s a whole story behind it where she told us it was kind of shocking but at the same time nice story where the patient, again, it was a mistake in terms of reporting his death. But she figured that out on the table when they asked for a certain autopsy because it was an accident that happened. And they wanted some X-ray autopsy or certain information, and she figured that out. Another patient met, the X-ray tech who figured out that the patient was potentially pregnant and nobody talked about that. Even the patient wasn’t aware of that. But from certain behavior, he insisted on checking on that. And then once they checked before the X-ray, that saved her and the baby from that perspective. So a lot of nice stories as well out there where the Red Techs have been heroes in terms of identifying certain things that were missed before or after.

Jennifer Callahan: Yes, it’s crazy, different information comes out of just asking some simple questions or it’s like a checks and balances situation. How it is where governments even within healthcare. That’s why you have multiple people asking multiple questions. I think that patients get annoyed and don’t understand why someone keeps asking them the same question. Well, sometimes, I might just ask the question just slightly a different way and I’ll get a different answer, and the answer that comes out is important.

Roy Khodr: That’s quality assurance.

Jennifer Callahan: Right. Exactly. So where are you guys developing in the future? Do you have any, like, cool new courses that that you’re, that you have in the works that to come out for maybe the end of the year or the upcoming year?

Roy Khodr: We’re continuously producing, and developing courses in both languages, French and English. And we define our product plan usually by the end of the year. So for 2024, it was already defined back in October and November with some adaptation that comes during the year. So on a regular basis, almost every month or month and a half, we have 1 or 2 courses, at the very least coming up. We have updates on old courses that we make in some cases. So we define our percentage of resources in terms of how many updates we need to make, how many new courses we need to release the recent one, the most recent one and the most interesting one, the one that you saw, the 3D animated positioning guide which we put out for free. Frankly, it was a hell of an effort that was behind it in terms of 3D designers experts red techs, and radiologists in France, and in the USA to validate all this content and to ensure that we managed to cover as much as possible everything. I guess we covered everything. To put it in a very direct point where people can find their answers immediately.

Jennifer Callahan: I love that. There were a few on there that caught my eye. I had my biennium coming up at the end of this year in December, so I unfortunately, always wait until the last minute to do my CE credits. I don’t know why it happens every few years, but it’s not you. So on a few of the credits, I’d like to take a look at the upcoming webinars. Because I love new information. I feel like I’ve been stagnant in terms of what I’ve been taking in terms of radiology.

Roy Khodr: I guess tonight we have one coming up.

Jennifer Callahan: Okay. All right. So, everybody, this is Roy joining me tonight. Not even tonight. Geez, it’s the morning. Where I am? I don’t know why I said.

Roy Khodr: It’s tonight, where I am?

Jennifer Callahan: But this is Rory joining me this morning and this evening where he is talking about medical professionals and continuing education credits. So if you’re in the boat like I am and you’re always looking to do something like that, go check it out. We’ll make sure that we include the website on our Spotify and our YouTube and our Apple information where this is playing at. So thanks again for being with me. I enjoyed our conversation.

Roy Khodr: Thank you, Jen. Same here. Have a great day.

Jennifer Callahan: All right, everybody, check us out next week, as I say, you can find us on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube. So we’ll see you next week. You’ve been watching The Skeleton-Crew, brought to you by xraytech.org. On the next episode, join us to explore the present and the future of the Rad Tech career and the field of radiology.