Teleradiology and its Place in a Customer-Centric Environment
It’s officially football season. Games have football fans across the country breaking out their jerseys and clearing their schedules on Sunday for big hits and long drives. For radiologists working in the NFL, those big hits often require their services, including teleradiology services that assist doctors and trainers in figuring out if a player stays in the game or is placed on the disabled list.
Radiology Business recently featured an article on a radiologic technologist who worked in the NFL. Anthony Anderson spent a lot of time on the sidelines, watching over athletes. He reveals that there are actually nearly 30 medical personnel on the field on any given Sunday. Due to the focus on chronic brain damage that players experience that’s being highlighted more and more, the NFL is placing more importance on the role of radiologists.
Anderson notes that they look for signs that the player has a potential brain injury. One way to know is that their personality changes. At this point, they’ll take them in for an X-ray. Imaging systems have improved drastically, giving physicians a clearer, more diagnosable image from which to work, and this is important in teleradiology today.
In the NFL, getting an image back as quick as possible is of the upmost importance. While the NFL has a number of resources that most people don’t, we also know that the armchair quarterback also deserves a quick diagnosis on his or her medical image, and too often, radiologists will send out exams via a teleradiology solution and it gets lost or is slow getting to where it needs to go.
There needs to be more accountability involved and responsive work flow that allows everyone concerned to know the status of an exam. Too many organizations are using outdated platforms that were built for a single enterprise, and this is not a situation where one size fits all.
When you seek out a teleradiology solution, look for one with report distribution, mobile friendly design and functionality, integrated RIS, browser agnostic viewer, voice recognition and the ability to change the priority of your exams after they’ve gone out. Not all vendors are advanced enough to offer all of this, but there is one that can.
OffSite Image Management, Inc. has developed a solution that brings a new platform to the forefront – one that can fill the gaps where accountability issues would often crop up. Teleradiology can be a complicated aspect of healthcare, which is why we’ve developed Telerad360. Our solution gives total exam accountability back to hospitals. Should a patient’s exam change in priority, our solution gives you the power to do what you couldn’t before – prioritize exams after they’ve gone out. Contact us today and we’ll tell you how TeleRad360 will change the way you process your workflow.