Masks, physical distancing, and teleradiology are part of the new reality for imaging practices that have resumed services to address the backlog of non-urgent screenings and diagnostic exams.
The adoption of internal teleradiology—radiologist is employed by the practice but reads from home or remotely— is now a growing trend in comparison to its more familiar counterpart, external teleradiology. Most radiologists have reported that working from home has reduced their stress levels and improved their productivity and turnaround time.
To facilitate reading from home, practices need to provide their radiologists with certified diagnostic quality monitors, high-speed internet, and secure access to the PACS server at a minimum. To optimize your teleradiology setup to read from home or remotely, here’s what we recommend:
1) Cloud-based PACS – This eliminates the need for a VPN tunnel. VPN connections are typically slower because their speed depends on your facility’s internet connection and due to the VPN software having to encrypt every packet of data being transmitted. It’s also inconvenient because you cannot access the on-premise PACS from different locations where the VPN tunnels are not established. Setting up multiple VPN connections is costly and time-consuming. A cloud-based PACS offers quick and secure access from anywhere, which makes it the best-suited solution for remote reading.
2) Caching of Studies – With studies being automatically cached onto home workstations, radiologists do not have to wait until images are downloaded from a remote server to begin reading. This improves their productivity and turnaround time.
3) Built-in Secure Messaging – HIPAA compliant secure communications enable radiologists to quickly connect with their counterparts or referring physicians for urgent updates about their patients’ exam. This facilitates better collaboration for patient care.
4) Unified Worklist – For radiologists who read for multiple sites, keeping track of separate worklists can be a challenging task. A unified worklist is an efficient solution that organizes all studies into one simple customized list for radiologists. RamSoft’s Unified Worklist includes a ‘worklist alerts’ feature that enables administrators to create alerts for studies that require immediate attention based on the status of the patients’ study within the workflow. This feature can be used by all departments and is extremely valuable to radiologists for alerts on STAT studies.
RamSoft can help you optimize your teleradiology setup to read from home. If you are interested, please speak to any of our sales experts.
