Surveying the Landscape
Bulent Arslan, MD, FSIR The Rush roadmap
Creating an independent academic IR practice By Brian Haefs
A
t the SIR 2024 Annual Scientific Meeting, Workshop Chair Bulent Arslan, MD, FSIR, spoke passionately
about the need for IR to forge its own path and formally separate from diagnostic radiology.
They weren’t just words or an abstract concept to him. For many years, he’d been working on separating IR from DR at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. At the time of the SIR 2024 presentation, he was finally poised to make IR an independent department. It was the culmination of years of slow, deliberate effort—but today, Rush has a
20 IRQ | FALL 2025
thriving independent department. And according to Dr. Arslan, the path they took to get there is replicable for other academic IRs seeking new opportunities.
The journey begins When the American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) approved interventional radiology as a primary medical specialty in 2012, Dr. Arslan saw validation of his longtime emphasis on the importance of clinical IR. He also saw an opportunity for the IRs at Rush.
“The business model of IR is so different from that of DR,” he said. “As clinicians, we can do more than treat the patients
who are brought to us. We can bring in our own patients. And hospital administrators place the greatest value on clinicians who can do that.”
However, IR’s value was getting lost within the radiology department: The IRs only performed procedures as ordered and were limited to providing a vein clinic. The answer was to become an independent IR department, but Dr. Arslan knew that journey wouldn’t happen overnight.
“Before your IR group can become a formal department, it has to start acting like one,” he said.
The first step to demonstrating value to the hospital was to expand IR services. The group converted its vein clinic into a full IR ambulatory clinic that performed more complex therapeutic procedures like radioembolization, complex peripheral arterial and venous interventions, and spine procedures, in addition to the standard cases they already performed.
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