Parrish Medical Center designated a Breast Imaging Center of Excellence

Parrish Healthcare is marking 10 years as an accredited breast imaging center of excellence, a decade in which more than 92,000 exams have received the “highest level of image quality and safety,” according to the nation’s premier imaging accrediting organization.

In 2009, Parrish Medical Center (PMC) first earned American College of Radiology (ACR) Breast Imaging Center of Excellence designation. Today the earned accreditation is in the name of Parrish Healthcare, an integrated care organization that includes PMC, Parrish Medical Group physicians, Parrish Healthcare diagnostic centers, and other health care providers working together to ensure well-coordinated, unified patient care.

“The difference between talking about imaging excellence and proving it is a great deal of hard work by professionals with one objective: protecting the health of patients,” said Drew Waterman, Vice President of Ambulatory Services. “ACR accreditation is hard to achieve. The standards are high, and they should be high.

“Accreditation is a voluntary program, and we challenged ourselves to achieve that goal,” Waterman said. “To earn accreditation for 10 straight years is important to us in that imaging patients derive the greatest benefit from a center of excellence.”

ACR accreditation is achieved only by breast imaging centers that have demonstrated excellence in “all the college’s voluntary, breast-imaging accreditation programs and modules, in addition to the mandatory Mammography Accreditation Program,” the ACR says on its website.

The accreditation process includes peer-review evaluations by imaging experts who are board-certified physicians and medical physicists. The accreditation evaluation saw Parrish Healthcare achieve high practice standards in image quality, personnel qualifications, facility equipment, quality control procedures, and quality assurance programs.

“Parrish Healthcare is proud to be one of only two breast imaging centers in Brevard County to be designated a Breast Imaging Center of Excellence, and the only one in north Brevard,” Waterman said.

The ACR, headquartered in Reston, Va., is a national organization serving more than 32,000 diagnostic/interventional radiologists, radiation oncologists, nuclear medicine physicians, and medical physicists with programs focusing on the practice of medical imaging and radiation oncology, as well as the delivery of comprehensive healthcare services.