Subcommittees

SMART Practitioners

Focus on evolving the practice of medical physics as new ideas and technologies impact this field.

What are SMART Practitioners?

Medical physics in general is not a static field. The Smart Practitioners subcommittee is focused on the aspect of elevating our practice, innovating, and optimizing. Medical physicists elevate our practice by being nimble at recognizing internal as well as external forces impacting how we accomplish both tasks and visionary practices. We innovate by evaluating the tools available and the technology necessary to allow the vision to become practice. We optimize by providing solutions leveraging the tools, resources and technology on hand and recognizing new technology that would be helpful to achieve our goals.

Problem
Goal
Problem

Enhancing Technical Competency
For medical physicists, enhancing technical competency can be difficult with artificial intelligence and new data science making its way into the field of medical physics.

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Goal
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  • Streamlining these new concepts to help physicist with little knowledge get over this learning curve.
  • Advocating for residency programs to expose the resident to machine learning/deep learning concepts in medical physics, e.g. bringing in speakers who can explain topics of AI.
Problem

Engineering the Care Process
Medical physicists tend to comply to the regulations that are given to us. We need the resources and networking to assess whether testing is relevant to the technology/modality.

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Goal
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  • Is there something that we should be testing?
  • How can we advocate for something that needs to be tested?
  • We need to advertise ourselves as a Think Tank for improving patient care and safety.
Problem

Practicing Concepts in Medical Physics Leadership Academy (MPLA)
The MPLA focuses on emotional competency for medical physicists including skills such as conflict management, initiative, adaptability, empathy, and emotional self-awareness. These skills vary between physicists but are critical to our success or failure in the healthcare field. They must be continuously cultivated throughout a physicist’s career starting in the graduate program through to residency and beyond.

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Goal
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  • We are focused on how to integrate/educate physicists about these skills by developing relationships with graduate, residency programs and at conferences.
Problem

Implementation of Ideas in Journals
Journals like Medical Physics have great content. However, many of these ideas are not widely implemented. Some ideas are complicated and perhaps brand new to the reader. To help make these ideas easier to adopt in the clinic, it would be worth having a clinical digest.

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Goal
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  • Work with the publication committee of the AAPM to advocate for a clinical digest.