ARTICLE
Teleradiology PACS: 4 Great Ways to Optimize Your Setup
Published September 18,2020
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. Teleradiology PACS system has become essential software for physicians to read, diagnose, and report from anywhere in the fastest and most reliable way.
Let’s start talking about optimizing your teleradiology PACS system setup!
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. RamSoft’s Imaging EMR solution, OmegaAI, enables you to access your teleradiology workflow at any time, anywhere, while allowing you to streamline your radiology workflow.
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-native Imaging EMR like RamSoft’s OmegaAI 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 PACS setup to read from home with an Imaging EMR software platform, OmegaAI, that offers limitless benefits including cost advantages, data entry and error reduction, infinite expandability, flexible storage & routing, and convenient support options.
