Chicago, IL – The Chicago Radiological Society (CRS) will honor Carl L. Kalbhen, MD, FACR, of Northwest Community Healthcare (NCH) in Arlington Heights, Illinois, with the presentation of the Distinguished Service Award (DSA), the highest honor the Society can bestow upon a member. The DSA – or Gold Medal – will be presented to Dr. Kalbhen at the April 16, 2020, CRS Meeting, recognizing his many years of service to radiology as well as his leadership in organized medicine on local, state and national levels.
Born in Park Ridge, Illinois, Kalbhen received his undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1985 and his medical degree from the University of Chicago in 1989. Following an internal medicine internship at Weiss Memorial Hospital in Chicago, he completed residency training in Diagnostic Radiology at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, serving as Chief Resident during his final year, before moving to California where he completed a Fellowship in Abdominal Imaging at the University of California, San Francisco in 1995.
Dr. Kalbhen then returned to Loyola as Assistant Professor of Radiology, where he served on the department’s Radiology Resident Selection Committee, Radiology Computer/Technology Committee and Radiology Quality Assurance Committee and was the Coordinator of the Radiology Visiting Professor Committee. Dr. Kalbhen was honored with Loyola’s Department of Radiology Distinguished Faculty Teacher Award in 1997. In 1999, he joined Northwest Community Healthcare while continuing to regularly teach at Loyola where he was subsequently promoted to Clinical Associate Professor of Radiology in 2008. Dr. Kalbhen is Medical Director of both Pediatric Radiology and General Radiology at Northwest Community Healthcare. His additional responsibilities included chairing the Medical Staff Quality Improvement Committee and Physician Quality Clinical Practices Committee and serving on the Clinical Decision Support Committee.
Past President of the Chicago Radiological Society, Dr. Kalbhen has been a member of the CRS Executive Committee since 2000 and currently chairs the CRS Public Information Committee. At the state level, Dr. Kalbhen is Past President of the Illinois Radiological Society (IRS) and has served on the IRS Executive Committee since 2004. He currently is a member of the both the IRS Membership Committee and Fellowship Committee.
On the national stage, Dr. Kalbhen has served Illinois as both Alternate Councilor and Councilor to the American College of Radiology (ACR) since 2005. A Fellow of the American College of Radiology since 2008, he currently serves as a member of the ACR’s Pediatric Caucus as well as on the Measurement and Assessment Subcommittee and has been the Illinois Key State Legislative Contact on Government Affairs. Dr. Kalbhen is also a current member of the American Roentgen Ray Society and the Radiological Society of North America, serving on the latter’s Local Committee on Education Exhibits for 10 years.
Dr. Kalbhen has authored or coauthored 22 peer-reviewed articles, coauthored 5 book chapters, and served as manuscript reviewer for both the Journal of Computer Assisted Tomography and the American Journal of Roentgenology. Along with other members of his NCH practice, Dr. Kalbhen remotely interprets CT studies performed in Haiti on a pro bono basis. He also volunteers as a grant reviewer for Autism Speaks and participates in the Northwest Community Healthcare local high school student mentoring program and physician speaker bureau.
Dr. Kalbhen is the father of two college-aged children – Daniel, a senior at the University of Iowa, and Allison, a freshman at the University of California, Irvine. In his spare time, he enjoys nurturing his creative impulses and stressing his right brain. Such endeavors include playing the guitar, producing x-ray art (xraythis.org) and live storytelling, the latter having been performed on stage with The Moth.
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