Health Imaging & IT - June 2008 - (Page 9)

T he Deficit Reduction Act has taken its toll and “we have reasons to believe that there will be further cuts,” says Kirk Lawson, administrator of the New York University radiology department. “Radiology is going to remain a potential target down the road in the next few years for further cuts.” As a large enterprise, NYU is surviving in spite of cuts. Also, as an independent, private center, “our volume, size and ability to be flexible lets us respond more easily.” Nationally, hospitals are challenged to do more with less, he says. “I know that if I want additional staff, I have to know that I’m being highly productive and can justify new staff.” compared to volume.” Based on the payroll schedule, it’s updated every two weeks. Getting granular “We can get very granular in detail. If we don’t appear particularly productive in a payroll period, we can see what’s going on, such as whether it’s due to holidays or people covering overtime.” The same applies to procedure volumes—if they’ve dropped, Lawson can see if it correlates to a drop in hospital census. Administrators can respond on a continuous basis. All of these tools play to the administration’s focus on “transforming us into a worldclass care institution,” he says. “Embedded in that is productivity.” Hospital administration expects department leaders to utilize productivity tools and respond. Since expensive equipment is involved in radiology, any savings and making the maximum use of resources, including space, staff and equipment, are important. Another vital element of productivity is phone reporting capabilities. NYU has a scheduling department within radiology that uses software to track the average abandoned call rate. “If it’s taking five minutes to impacts referring physician satisfaction, patient satisfaction and profitability. On the hospital side, NYU works with the facility HIS and CPOE system. “We work with escort and expedite orders as efficiently as possible.” Escort services uses tracking software to triage and parse out the workflow, which serves as another metric. “For inpatients, productivity hinges on collaboration with escort. Discrepancies can result in empty scanner time.” Staff and equipment metrics Integration between the RIS and imaging systems also helps track productivity. “Information from the scanner populates our RIS,” says Lawson. The data include when a procedure began and ended, when the patient left the department, time stamp when a physician orders an x-ray on an ED patient and more. That also interfaces with the facility’s dictation system, which sends information on when radiologists finish preliminary and final reports. “It’s very precise and very powerful,” he says. Reducing ED turn-around time and length of stay are department goals, as is setting up same-day service for MRI, and Complicated workflow NYU’s radiology department provides services for three hospitals in eight locations, and performs just over 300,000 studies a year. “As we get larger and have more locations, workflow gets more complicated.” The team offers the full gamut of interventional and diagnostic imaging studies and is highly subspecialized in MR, CT, cardiac CT, nuclear medicine and ultrasound. The facility switched to the Workflow RIS from Siemens Medical Solutions last fall. After using their previous RIS for 11 years, the facility underwent a massive conversion, says Lawson, migrating forward 3.5 million studies. “We decided to convert data rather than start with a clean slate. That made the project more challenging.” NYU also has a home-grown, internal department software called RadClinInfo— a web-based site begun in early 2000 that hosts a “cavalcade of important data for performance measurement,” Lawson says. Within the facility’s financial department is decision-support services that has its own staff. The group helps the institution look at both staff and supply productivity, Lawson says. “It’s an extremely important tool because it allows us to, by payroll, have graphic presentation of how staffing looks HealthImaging.com “Our goal was web distribution and having one spot that the radiologist or cardiologist could go to to view images.” Brad Shook, medical imaging manager, Medical Center Hospital in Odessa, Texas get through scheduling, we’ll have a higher abandoned call rate,” Lawson says. The RIS conversion forced the facility to look at all processes to customize the system. That can cause setbacks in high transaction areas like scheduling. “We consistently have a high volume of encounters. Adding 30 seconds to each call has an immediate impact.” The calls impact how effectively the scanner is utilized. Although there isn’t much empty scanner time, Lawson says the team recently whittled a five-day backlog down to four days. That reduction favorably Lawson expects these reports to help reach those achievements. Plus, “The Joint Commission is very keen on understanding that we’re always working to improve turnaround times.” Another way facilities can maintain or improve productivity is by more evenly distributing the workload among staff and locations. Medical Center Hospital in Odessa, Texas, has been using Enterprise Medical Image Management from ScImage since last fall to distribute cardiology and radiology images. “Our goal was web distribution June 2008 | Health Imaging & IT http://HealthImaging.com

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

Health Imaging & IT - June 2008 Contents On The Web The Enterprise News Update Cover Story: Pushing Productivity: How Imaging is Building Efficiency and Cutting Costs Technology Outlook: Imaging Procedures Poised for Growth Great Expectations: PET/CT Delivers SPECT/CT Proving it's Potential MR/PET Holds Promise Good Image Management: Infiltrating Molecular Imaging SNM Preview Modality Review: Mammography’s Next Step: The Dawning of Breast Tomosynthesis Managing Technology: Radiation Oncology: Opening the Doors to IT Reader's Resource Stat Sheet

Health Imaging & IT - June 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.