Kimberley Applegate

1. What are your key areas of interest and research?
Quality, safety and systems improvement, including radiation protection, policy, and clinical guidelines. Research interests include the study of safety events, radiation dose optimisation, and evidence based imaging of abdominal conditions in children.

2. What are the major challenges in your field?
All of medicine, including radiology, is grappling with rapid changes in practice, patient expectations and scientific knowledge. It is difficult for the health care worker to keep up with the uncoordinated demands of each stakeholder. In addition, the radiology profession faces unprecedented pressure to be more efficient at the potential costs of physician burnout, worker training gaps and patient safety. The radiology community will need to monitor these issues and communicate effectively to support our patients and each other so that we prevent these undesired outcomes.

3. What is your top management tip?
Articulate a common purpose for the team you lead. When individual team member goals conflict, go back to the common purpose or strategic plan to try to diffuse these individual conflicts.

4. What would you single out as a career highlight?
Mentoring talented women and men in their developing careers (medical school, training, junior faculty), has been a rich and rewarding experience. I have enjoyed watching them learn, teach me, and succeed in so many ways.

5. If you had not chosen this career path you would have become…
…astronaut, photographer, marine scientist.

6. What are your personal interests outside of work?
Walking in nature, in the woods; reading fiction and non-fiction; movies; being with friends.

7. Your favourite quote?
“The system is designed perfectly to get the results that it gets”, by Dr. Paul Batalden

The full Zoom On interview with Kimberley Applegate and more healthcare IT and radiology leaders can be found in ourBlog section.