Educational Interventions to Improve Screening Mammography Interpretation: A Randomized Controlled Trial

OBJECTIVE. The objective of our study was to conduct a randomized controlled trial of educational interventions that were created to improve performance of screening mammography interpretation. MATERIALS AND METHODS. We randomly assigned physicians who interpret mammography to one of three groups: self-paced DVD, live expert-led educational seminar, or control. The DVD and seminar interventions used mammography cases of varying difficulty and provided associated teaching points. Interpretive performance was compared using a pretest-posttest design. Sensitivity, specificity, and positive predictive value (PPV) were calculated relative to two outcomes: cancer status and consensus of three experts about recall. The performance measures for each group were compared using logistic regression adjusting for pretest performance. RESULTS. One hundred two radiologists completed all aspects of the trial. After adjustment for preintervention performance, the odds of improved sensitivity for correctly identifying a le...