Imaging Center ~ Single Modality

THE CLIENT

• Three MRI Centers owned by investors
• 750 studies per month
• Reading performed by an outside Tele-radiology Group
• Goal: Consolidate the Scheduling Department; Reduce Time Spent on phone with Referring Practices; Simplify the Ordering Process for Referring Practices; Grow Referrals
• DigitalOne products implemented: Orders Communicator, Desktop Delivery, Results Communicator

PRE-DIGITALONE

The three MRI centers were very successful with a forward thinking and proactive management.   The three locations were approximately 20 miles from each other and each location had its own scheduler.   Orders were being received in the following ways:

1.  Order was called in and scheduled with an order script to follow.

2.  For some high volume practices, order scripts were faxed in; the imaging center contacted and scheduled the patient; then a confirmation with scheduled date/time was faxed back to the practice.

CHALLENGES

The Client deduced that the schedulers were more productive in scenario 2 above.  However, communicating appointment schedules via fax was an overhead they wanted to eliminate without compromising referring practice need to be updated about scheduled dates for their patients.   Besides the manpower overhead, they also wanted to reduce their dependence on faxing because of the unreliability factor inherently related to faxing.

If they could address the workflow issues in Scenario 2 above, they would ideally like to migrate most of their referring practices towards Scenario 2.