Main Line Health expects imaging delays to end after Thanksgiving, as a radiologist shortage forces a rethink
The nonprofit health system has hired three additional outside firms to help speed results and is rethinking its contracts with private practices that have long provided radiology and other services.
Relief is on the way for Main Line Health patients who have experienced weekslong waits for X-ray, MRI, and other imaging results this year.
After the private physician group practice that provided those services lost a significant number of its radiologists, wait times for nonemergency studies stretched to as long as five weeks, according to patients’ posts in online community forums.
The turnaround time is expected to be back down to the industry standard of two days after Thanksgiving, Main Line’s CEO Ed Jimenez said in an interview this week.
Since becoming aware of staffing shortages at Radiology Associates of the Main Line P.C. in April, Jimenez and other executives at the nonprofit health system have been working for months to hire additional companies and have chosen three to supplement the private practice doctors, Jimenez said.
Jimenez said the problem compounded as the number of radiologists at the private practice fell by a fifth over the last two years. Doctors retired and others left the practice. Meanwhile, the number of imaging studies at Main Line increased by the same amount.
“In a world where work goes up by 20%, and the resource to do the work goes down by 20%, that’s challenging,” said Jimenez, who became Main Line’s CEO in June 2025. “The departures could not be overcome.”
Officials at Radiology Associates, headquartered in Newtown Square, did not respond to e-mailed requests for comment. Its automated phone system did not allow access to a person or the opportunity to leave a message. The practice’s website says it has 35 physicians.
It’s not clear if internal circumstances led physicians to leave Radiology Associates, which has had a contract with Main Line for decades under which it was paid $15 million in the year that ended June 30, 2025.
But the rise of remote work has made it possible for radiologists to leave hospitals and work from home for health systems anywhere, and often make more money, Jimenez and other experts said.
Getting more involved
Main Line and other community health systems, unlike hospital systems centered on a medical school, typically rely on outside physician groups for key services, such as emergency medicine, anesthesia, pathology, in additional to radiology.
Doctors in such specialties usually don’t have their own patients, but rather provide services across a health system’s entire population, or they work in difficult-to-staff areas like emergency rooms.
Main Line has historically used outside practices for all four of those services.
Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic and Virtua Health are among the other local nonprofit hospital systems that use independent practices for at least one of those services.
Main Line’s contracts with independent physician groups focus on quality standards, Jimenez said.
“We’ve obviously learned that we need to pay attention to the underlying economic health of the company,” Jimenez said. “Are doctors retiring, and what’s the replacement plan? Are doctors leaving? Why are they leaving? Because that would have given us great insight that we would have jumped on this earlier.”
For now, Main Line is relying on additional and more expensive outside companies to fix its radiology problem, while broadly rethinking a long-term solution. It could involve a modified contract with Radiology Associates, a combination of employed and independent physicians, or Main Line employment of all radiologists, Jimenez said.
