9
Dec
2009
Smaller world, bigger radiology department
We all know healthcare providers are under growing pressure. Demographic trends (we’re living longer), shrinking budgets and fewer staff are all conspiring to give even the most stress tolerant managers grey hairs. As if that wasn’t enough, radiology faces its own nightmarish dilemma—trained (and available) radiologists are rapidly becoming rarer than hens’ teeth. Is there any way out of this mess?
If there is, it’s called Sectra RIS/PACS (Radiology Information System/Picture Archiving and Communication System). This is going to get a bit technical, but I’ll try to explain. Basically, there’s no such thing as film in a modern radiology department; nowadays pictures are digital. What a RIS/PACS does is give radiologists access to images, interpretations and other relevant data—with just a few keystrokes.
The beauty of Sectra’s solution is that radiology departments actually have a chance of attracting those darned elusive radiologists. Quite simply because it allows them to work wherever they want as long as they have a reasonable internet connection. What’s more, by allowing hospitals and clinics to share scarce resources, it also means department managers can extend their search for available radiologists. It’s all thanks to a novel technology called RapidConnect , which streams the relevant parts of super-heavy images (think terabytes, not mega- or even gigabytes), allowing radiologists to start reading right away.
There, that wasn’t too technical, was it?
Sandberg Trygg has communicated the virtues of Sectra RIS/PACS across a variety of media—both on and offline, still and moving.