The Practice With a 1% Recall Rate

In 2013, a moderately sized breast imaging practice performing approximately 5,900 mammograms a year with a staff of eight interpreting physicians had built something genuinely ambitious: a breast excellence center designed around the patient experience. The premise was straightforward — when a patient came in for breast imaging, the facility would complete as much of the care pathway as possible during that visit. If a screening mammogram showed something requiring additional evaluation, the patient would not go home and wait for a callback. The workup would happen immediately.

Additional imaging on the same visit. If findings were suspicious, rapid movement toward biopsy. Less waiting, less anxiety, more of the care continuum completed before the patient walked out the door. From a patient-care standpoint, the model was excellent.

From an audit standpoint, it created a significant problem.

The practice's apparent recall rate was less than 1%. That number did not reflect reality — it reflected a measurement approach that had no way to account for what they were actually doing.

In a traditional workflow, a screening patient completes her exam, goes home, and is called back if additional imaging is needed. That recall is a documented event in the audit. It shows up. In this practice, the recall was happening — the additional imaging was being performed, the diagnostic workup was being completed — but the patient never left. There was no gap between screening and follow-up for the audit to measure. The practice was not avoiding recalls. It was completing them in real time, inside a single encounter.

The distortion did not stop at recall rate. Because recall rate feeds into other key performance indicators, the same-day workflow had cascaded through the audit. PPV1, FP1, and TP1 — measures that depend on an accurate count of recalled patients — were all affected. The audit was not just understating one metric. It was presenting a fundamentally incomplete picture of the practice's clinical performance.

The problem was identified before the audit was finalized. As part of its standard process, Mammologix reviews the key performance indicators of every Mammography Medical Outcome Audit with each client before final release — a validation step designed to catch exactly this kind of discrepancy. When the recall rate appeared, it was identified, discussed, and understood for what it was: not a data error, but a measurement model that had not been built for this workflow.

Because Mammologix reads every report of test results during the process of entering each patient's event into tracking, the same-day converted encounters were already in the data — readable, identifiable, traceable. That made reconstruction possible. Mammologix developed a conversion process that could accommodate both the standard method of deriving KPIs and a normalized calculation that accounted for the same-day workflow — treating those encounters as they would appear in the normal continuum of care on which the performance formulas are based.

The result was an audit that could show both pictures: what the numbers looked like under the standard model, and what they reflected when the practice's actual clinical pathway was accounted for. Once the converted cases were analyzed correctly, the true recall activity was in the 10% to 12% range — in line with expected performance for an active breast imaging practice.

That was not a failure. It was clarity. For the first time, the practice could see what was really happening.

They could measure the true volume of patients moving from screening into additional evaluation. They could track those patients through the full care pathway. They could evaluate outcomes in a way that matched the actual clinical workflow. The audit had become an accurate description of the practice — not a misleading artifact of a measurement model built for a different kind of operation.

Not every breast imaging practice operates the same way. An audit that cannot reflect how a practice actually works is not a compliance document — it is a misrepresentation. The audit has to follow the patient, not assume the workflow.