We have dedicated several issues of the Volunteer Connection to the practice analysis process. These past articles focused on the routine methods and analyses necessary to produce an exam we can call the gold standard. Today, we are going to look at a scenario where ARRT staff had to devise a creative solution to an important, and unexpected, question.
During the most recent Vascular Interventional Radiography (VI) practice analysis, several committee members and survey respondents said that their facilities were splitting neuro from the other body procedures. They suggested that it may be time to split the VI examination into two separate certifications, like we split the Cardiovascular credential into Cardiac Interventional and Vascular Interventional.
As we previously discussed, the practice analysis is designed to determine what tasks are typically required in practice. Once we heard about the clinical split between neuro and body procedures, we wanted to investigate how common the split was, and whether it should change the structure of the exam. So, we compared the proportion of neuro-specific and body-specific tasks that our survey respondents performed. As you can see in the image below, we found two major clusters; the majority perform most neuro and body procedures, while the smaller group performs body procedures almost exclusively. The committee determined that the exam should remain as is, but you can read the full practice analysis report (Practice Analysis Reports) if you want to know more.
This type of unexpected analysis is the reason that we need such a diverse group of subject matter experts to serve on our committee. That breadth of experience helps us catch changes when practice does not evolve consistently across regions or facilities. As a psychometrician, developing the analysis that answers questions that we never anticipated is one of the most rewarding parts of my job, and I have you, our volunteers, to thank. Your experience is the key to the entire practice analysis process.
