Arkansas Online

Hospitals low on type of dye for CT scans

Covid shuts Chinese plant, leading to global shortage

TESS VRBIN

Arkansas hospitals are adjusting to a worldwide shortage of injectable fluid used for certain kinds of medical imaging, according to health officials throughout the state.

Medical professionals often use iodine-based contrast dye to generate internal images, mostly via CT scans. A pharmaceutical manufacturing plant in Shanghai temporarily closed as a covid-19 safety measure, creating a shortage of the dye.

Hospitals should use other forms of diagnostic imaging whenever possible to conserve the contrast dye they already have, according to recommendations from the American College of Radiology released May 13.

The Arkansas Hospital Association notified all its members of the shortage and the American College of Radiology guidance, association CEO Bo Ryall said Tuesday.

Ryall said the shortage is “going to be a big issue going forward,” with new shipments of dye unlikely until late June, but hospitals will come up with their own individual ways to meet their patients’ needs in the interim.

The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences usually performs 80 to 90 CT scans per day, using intravenous contrast dye for two-thirds of them, said Dr. Michelle Krause, a nephrologist and the vice chair for Clinical Operations, Quality and Efficiency in the UAMS Department of Internal Medicine.

Now the hospitals are restricting intravenous CT scans to “urgent and emergent conditions so there’s no patient care gap,” Krause said.

“Sometimes the default is to give the [IV] contrast, but there are times you might not need it and still get the answer” to the medical question at hand, she said.

The American College of Radiology urges medical professionals not to “sacrifice image quality by using

suboptimal doses” of contrast dye, according to the recommendations on its website.

Resources for MRI scans, ultrasounds, non-intravenous CT scans and other medical imaging methods are still available, she said.

“We’re very fortunate in that regard because we can use other radiology tests to look at things, and we can still use CT scans without the administration of IV contrasts,” she said.

Arkansas’ rural hospitals “haven’t been hit by [the shortage] yet,” said Lynn Hawkins, the media contact for the Arkansas Rural Health Partnership.

However, other hospitals in heavily populated areas are taking similar approaches to UAMS.

Baptist Health is “working with our physicians to be judicious in conserving supplies” while monitoring the hospitals’ amounts of contrast dye on a daily basis, communications director Cara Wade said in an emailed statement.

All three facilities within the St. Bernards Healthcare system in Jonesboro are deferring routine follow-up CT scans for low-risk patients

so that those in oncology, surgery and other high-risk medical scenarios can get the scans they need, said Mitchell Nail, the St. Bernards media relations manager.

“One good thing about having three different hospitals is being able to share resources [between them], as well as sharing resources among our community partners,” Nail said. “Maybe one facility is able to get a certain [resource] and we’re able to share among the others and give those back when another allocation comes in.”

He added that the contrast dye shortage is not the first supply-chain issue hospitals have faced because of the covid-19 pandemic.

Krause also acknowledged the periodic supply-chain problems.

“It’s something that we’ve managed before for the past two years, and it’s something that we’ll have to manage in the future,” she said.

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2022-05-23T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-05-23T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://edition.arkansasonline.com/article/281990381138277

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