Radiology ranked as the fifth most requested medical specialty in 2018 and, according the American Medical Association (AMA), is “making a comeback of sorts" in being among the most requested medical specialties in the U.S.  

The organization referenced data presented in an annual report released earlier this year from the healthcare search and consulting firm Merritt Hawkins.

“We knew imaging would come back because there’s virtually nothing in health care that can happen without an image anymore,” Travis Singleton, senior vice president of marketing and sales at Merritt Hawkins, told the AMA. “It’s come back sort of in two phases in that you still have your traditional radiologists and then we have this whole growing segment of teleradiologist, and we do as much teleradiology as we do regular radiology.”  

With only 80 requests last year, radiology had a total of 132 requests for 2018, according to the report. The specialty followed internal medicine, psychiatry and family medicine which topped the list for the 12th consecutive year with 497 requests.  

Singleton noted that the current struggle recruiting qualified teleradiolgsts being as hard as it is to find normal radiologists wasn’t the case two to three years ago.  

Additionally, Singleton said the constant changes in training and payment in addition to the “oversaturation” of radiologists in the workplace has attributed to the specialty's tendency to quickly rise and fall in popularity.  

Read the entire AMA story below.