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Reprints
The big lesson learned is to make sure that the solution truly supports the workflow of the clinicians. We really did stumble in the initial go-live; there were a number of things we hadn’t thought of. But though we had fully engaged the radiology department staff, we hadn’t, in my view, engaged the radiologists fully enough in the design and implementation phases. The other learning was that we did experience some downtimes and experienced some loss of productivity. And we’ve lost internet connectivity for brief periods of time, by every way you could lose it, and through every failure point of WANs possible. So we put a server here in this building, to maintain Internet connectivity.
Based on your experience, what would your advice be to CIOs and CMIOs?
I just think they should be willing to consider novel approaches to providing a platform for their physicians to work on. In our case, having a teleradiology solution like vRad that also provides the viewing capabilities, and doesn’t require any additional capital costs; and in addition, it really lowers our operational costs. In fact, our vRad costs are actually lower than the yearly maintenance fees we used to pay to our old vendor. We don’t pay that to vRad; we pay them a per-study fixed maintenance fee. And we also don’t have to go through repeated upgrades here. I just think this approach is something that people should consider. Some people might have control issues—the idea that you don’t completely control the environment that you’re working in, that you’re dependent on another entity for our radiology solutions; maybe that’s a scary idea for some people. But it has worked well for us.
