The ACR awards accreditation to facilities for the achievement of high practice standards after a peer-review evaluation. Evaluations are conducted by board-certified physicians and medical physicists who are experts in the field. They assess the qualifications of the personnel and the adequacy of the facility equipment. The surveyors report their findings to the ACR’s Committee on Accreditation, which subsequently provides the practice with a comprehensive report.
“We invited the governing body, the ACR, in to take a look and compare us to the best practices in the country to see if we fit in. And we did,” said Peter Johnstone, M.D., chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology and William A. Mitchell Professor of Radiation Oncology at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
Dr. Johnstone, a physician/researcher at the Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Cancer Center, leads Indiana’s only academic radiation oncology practice. That practice includes the Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute (MPRI) and the IU Cyclotron Operations, both in Bloomington, Ind.
The ACR is a national organization serving more than 32,000 diagnostic and interventional radiologists, radiation oncologists, and nuclear medicine and medical physicists with programs focusing on the practice of medical imaging and radiation oncology and the delivery of comprehensive health care services.