Drowning in STAT: A Crisis We Must Fix

By Kernesha Weatherly

In today’s world, immediacy is everything. From on-demand entertainment to same-day shipping, society as we know it, has now conditioned itself to expect instant gratification. Gone are the times when you had to wait your turn to use the family landline, hoping the neighbor or your sibling would finally hang up so you could make a call. 

Remember sitting by the radio, cassette tape ready, waiting for your favorite song to play so you could record it, only for the DJ to talk over the intro? Or rushing to the mailbox to see if your pen pal, a faraway friend, or even a love interest had written you back? Before email and text messages, communication wasn’t instant; it was an exercise in patience. 

These moments, once a natural part of daily life, have all but disappeared, replaced by a culture of now. While convenience has its perks, there was something uniquely satisfying about the anticipation of waiting. Something today’s instant world may never quite understand.

This mentality has seeped into healthcare, where the word STAT has become less about true urgency and more about an expectation of immediacy, regardless of medical necessity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of Imaging, where an overabundance of STAT imaging orders is stretching departments to their limits. But was this really the intended goal?