Turning to the Cloud to Support a Diffuse Radiology Practice

On the financial side of things, to say it’s paid for itself, you kind of have to go into the theoretical realm, based on the idea that we’re billing more money. So theoretically, you could say that; in the end, it’s very, very expensive technology. But it has become a necessary tool, for a couple of reasons. For one, it’s made our workflow better. And the quality of the work day has improved. And also, not only did we buy the Viztek PACS; we also bought the Viztek PACS for a couple of the smaller hospitals, too.

So it makes it easier for everybody?

Absolutely. Nobody has any money anymore, the government is cutting back on reimbursement, and these critical-access hospitals are barely making it now. So we bought not only the Viztek DICOM gateway, but also actually bought the PACS for a couple of the hospitals, and have leased them to them, and they can afford to pay a small monthly fee to us, so we actually get a little payment each month from two of the six critical-access hospitals.

What have the biggest lessons learned been?

As we talked about, if you have everything funneling into one system, you have made your daily work easier, which in essence allows you to provide better service to your clients, and that’s what they want. Even though they’re a small hospital, they want quick turnarounds on reports, and if you’re able to do that, you’ve won. Our turnaround time went down dramatically when we went to Viztek. Previously, we had had to log into their systems, write our reports, etc. And also, with several of the hospitals, we hadn’t been able to sign our reports remotely. So now we can turn around reports and electronically sign them within an hour, versus in the past, a day or longer, because we had to drive to them to sign the reports. What’s more, using this system, we have a worklist to read, and anytime a case is designated as stat by the ordering facility, it immediately changes color and goes to the top of the list.

You’re obviously feeling the pressure to provide quicker turnarounds these days, correct?

Correct. And in the world of medicine, oftentimes, time is money, particularly in an ER situation. And the hospitals want the patients to get in and get out, and people want quicker results. In the smaller hospitals, they might not have a true ER physician on duty; often, it’s a family physician. And the non-radiologist physicians are just not as comfortable looking at their own studies; and now they can get quicker turnaround from us. Radiology has always been a technological field; and now the whole computer thing has come to radiology, too.