Health Imaging & IT - March 2008 - (Page 43)

CAPTUS 3000 ® Count on Capintec with the Thyroid Uptake and Well System of x-ray rooms and you don’t have to pay support on as many rooms. Although CR has less upfront costs, he points out that the cassettes and screens have a very finite lifetime and they are expensive to replace. “The cost between the two technologies all of sudden becomes not that much different when spread over five to seven years.” DeCramer conservatively planned her return on investment, but feels that the practice broke even the day they went live. “There were so many benefits,” she says. Aside from concrete costs such as film storage and processing chemicals, there were numerous, less tangible advantages. “How do you put a dollar value on not keeping patients waiting?” she says. It’s difficult to estimate the financial damage one unhappy patient can do once word spreads. The Captus® 3000 comes Captus ® 3000 equipped with a “Quick Start Displaying the Up” feature that walks the Quick Start-Up Screen user through all program setup functions. The feature will have you performing patient studies in no time! It also serves as a training tool for additional users, while providing fast, dedicated modules for Thyroid Uptake, Wipe Tests, Schilling Test, Blood Volume, RBC Survival and Bio-Assay. lessons from the trenches To get the most out of a switch to DR, Whitmarsh recommends modifying department or facility workflow. “Forget what you know about workflow and build a new workflow that maximizes the technology.” For example, Whitmarsh says DR is so fast that he’s been able to operate with fewer technologists and different support staff. He spent a week quantifying the actual tasks of licensed staff members and then rearranged duties so that licensed staff were only responsible for tasks that require a license. “In the ER, that resulted in a significant change in the structure of staff.” And, when a new outpatient imaging center opens this month, only one technologist will be needed to run two DR rooms. DeCramer agrees that DR requires a change in workflow. “You have to sit down and evaluate what you do and how your practice operates and search for equipment that matches that,” she says. “If you don’t do due diligence, you’re going to be unhappy. You really have to do your homework.” McHenry physicians decided as a group that it had to be an all-ornothing commitment to DR. Having both systems—DR and plain film—was not going to work, DeCramer says. When the system was installed, the doctors had one day to use either analog or the new digital x-ray and then the practice went totally digital. “It’s crucial to get everyone on the same page.” To get them all onto that page, DeCramer created spreadsheets showing all the tasks the technologists do to take x-rays and all the steps the physicians take to read those images. With DR, the tech spreadsheet decreased by about four pages. The physician spreadsheet hardly changed at all, which illustrated that “their world did not change.” DeCramer also pointed out that film and other costs associated with analog x-ray systems continue to increase every year while, after the initial investment, the costs for DR drop to almost zero. “You still have maintenance and service charges, but you already have that with x-ray. When they looked at it that way, it was a revolution for them. They realized that, financially, making a switch to DR was the right thing to do.” Plus they had the added benefits of no lost films and the ability to enhance images—a win for the practice, the physicians, the technologists and the patients. HealthImaging.com Cap-DICOM Software ® Capintec is proud to announce a new software application for its Captus ® 3000 Thyroid Uptake System designed to help meet the needs of our customers working in a digital reporting environment Cap-DICOM™ adds DICOM modality worklist and DICOM export to the Captus® 3000. This solution allows patient information and demographics to be pulled from the Radiology Information System (RIS) or Hospital Information System (HIS), thus, reducing errors and time associated with the manual input of patient information. Cap-DICOM™ creates a DICOM secondary capture image from information generated during the uptake procedure. The software exports the DICOM image files to a destination DICOM C-Store provider specified by the user. This destination may be a nuclear medicine workstation or PACS. To learn more about the Captus ® 3000 Thyroid Uptake System, Cap-DICOM ™ Software and many other great Capintec products, contact a Capintec representative at 201-825-9500 or toll free at 800-631-3826. Capintec, Inc. 201.825.9500• 800.631.3826 www.capintec.com March 2008 | Health Imaging & IT 43 http://www.capintec.com http://www.capintec.com http://HealthImaging.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Health Imaging & IT - March 2008

Health Imaging & IT - March 2008 Table of Contents On the Web The Enterprise: Communicating Better News Update Critical Test Results Management: The Human Touch The Changing Face of the Cath Lab Cardiovascular CT: A Clinical Boon Cardiology PACS: Solutions to Fit Your Needs ACC 08: Building Quality & Value Together Picking the Perfect PACS Displays PET/CT: A Game-Changer in Cancer Patient Management DR: You Gotta Have IT – Delivering Speed, Efficiency, Savings Laser Imagers: Answering the Call for Hard Copy Reader's Resources Stat Sheet

Health Imaging & IT - March 2008

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