A national registry for clinical and diagnostic radiation should be established. Many providers can expose patients to harmful (but often necessary) radiation through x-rays, CT scans, radiation therapy and other sources. However, providers never looks at total exposure across all sources since these exposure are done independently and usually without consideration of total exposure or frequency of exposure. Moreover, since this data is not collected or monitored, no epidemiological observations are available that could correlate possible links to chronic illnesses for both short term and lifetime exposures.
This registry could be built very economically and could provide useful insights into short and long term radiation exposures relationships to patient health.