Managing Imaging Informatics Processes in a Multispecialty, Urban Group Practice Setting

There are six or seven medical records people, scanning and indexing records. We just had someone leave the other day but there was no need to replace them, since we had this whole FTE back. So we gained back the productivity of a full FTE, and the reports are available in our EMR as soon as they are finalized by the reading radiologist.

What had the time lag been?

On average, it was about a day from the time it was finalized to the time it was available to the provider.

How many radiologists work at West Side Radiology?

At 95th Street, there’s just a single reading radiologist. Now, West Side Radiology has eight or nine radiologists across the city. Our patients will go to either 95th Street or another one of their facilities; but if everybody does what they should, per MPG patients, we’ll always receive the report. And 95 percent of the time, if it’s happening at one of the sites in our physical sites, we’ll receive the report. It also eliminates the paper and faxing costs.

What are the next steps in this process?

Because Continuum and their imaging system are on different platforms—they’re all GE/IDX, but they’re on different versions—they’re not ready yet to receive electronic orders. So that’s the beauty of having the CriticalKey engine in between. So the next thing I want to accomplish is to send the order electronically from NextGen; and CriticalKey would hold that order, and ideally, the RIS system would accept that order electronically, but if not, they would manually key in the order upon registration at radiology, and when they came back, the RIS system would match the order numbers and send it into our system, so the patient wouldn’t need to remember the piece of paper, the staff at West Side Radiology wouldn’t have as many items to manually key in, and we send all of our patients to West Side, which means that when my providers order through NextGen, they can be ordering the exact same test, and the details of the order would be automatically matched. That would save us work and would give us a better tracking system so that we can manage the system better. The other thing that we do want is that we’d like a link to the image sent over with the report.