Insights on Achieving Radiology Workflow Optimization

Radiology workflow, loosely defined, refers to a set of chronologically grouped processes and resources that are necessary to achieve a radiology department’s objectives. In imaging practices, radiology workflow optimization implies the organization of resources and processes in a manner that maximizes benefits to your business.

What’s more, in today’s highly competitive radiology space, the demand for increased efficiency and productivity has grown exponentially. This has prompted more imaging practices to emphasize radiology workflow optimization. Despite the increased emphasis on optimization, chief radiologists continue facing challenges in achieving the highest levels of radiology workflow optimization.

Therefore, having more insights into improving your radiology workflow optimization can be a game-changer for your practice. Here are three insights that you can employ.

Insights on Achieving Radiology Workflow Optimization

1. Leverage Customizable PACS

Rising costs, data protection regulations, cross-site collaboration, and increasing volumes of examinations are just a few challenges facing today’s radiology departments. Leveraging customizable picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) provides numerous opportunities that you can exploit to achieve optimal radiology workflow optimization.

With customizable PACS, your facility can adopt a solution that is highly flexible and can meet your unique needs. Due to the tailored and game-changing features—customized work lists and workflows, dedicated admin consoles, customized routing, HTML-5 web viewers, etc.—investing in a tailored PACS can help your facility achieve higher levels of workflow optimization.

In particular, using PACS tailored for your radiology imaging facility helps improve radiology workflow via onsite resource planning, noticeably reducing workloads among your staff. Working with online-based and tailored appointment solutions that are integrated with radiology information systems eliminates manual processes, increasing the time that your staff spends on life-saving clinical work. This also helps cut the time that’s needed to produce accurate diagnostic reports, contributing to improved treatment outcomes for your facility’s clients.

Take the case of a customizable PAC system like NovaPACS. Investing in this customizable solution can help your facility reap numerous workflow-improving benefits, including improved access to patient records from any computer device or location, the automation of essential radiology imaging processes, and quick and easy sharing of information.

For instance, the technicians at Jackson Purchase Center Medical Center lauded the barcode-based technology in improving workflows. Since the process of checking whether client images had been archived accurately in the facility’s PACS had been simplified, they were able to work on other important tasks, improving workflow in the facility.

NovaPACS can also help optimize your facility’s workflow by maintaining high uptime and reliability standards. Credited for 99.99% uptime and 24/7/365 support for the life of a contract, this solution can help optimize your radiology workflow by minimizing disruptions.

Cumulatively, the features of NovaPACS can help chief radiologists achieve higher radiology workflow optimization standards. The resulting benefits can lead to improved productivity, customer satisfaction, and profitability at your facility.

2. Achieve Radiology Workflow Optimization with Automation

Automation in the diagnostic radiology space offers a wide range of practical benefits that can improve and optimize workflows at your radiology facility. Specifically, automation helps your radiology business optimize workflows via the prioritization of data feeds and tasks. This helps your team become more productive. In turn, this reduces the unnecessary operational costs associated with underutilized labor.

Investing in NovaPACS introduces automated features like auto dictate, auto image sizing, auto checkout, auto segmentation, auto cine, etc. These features eliminate manual processes that often introduce bottlenecks in your workflow. The outcome is a highly optimized radiology workflow that helps your facility build a competitive edge over your peers in the industry.

Automation helps your facility comply with a wide variety of standards and regulations in diagnostic radiology. These standards include HIPAA, IHE, DICOM, ACR, and ICD-10. Complying with numerous regulations may be a challenge that affects workflow at your radiology business. Your staff has to do numerous tasks while trying to comply with the many guidelines. However, automating operations in your practice can help point out deviations in radiology guidelines. Also, pre-programmed protocols can help your staff stick to specific procedures, adhering to different standards and regulations. This improves your workflow and prevents disruptions associated with prolonged audits by governing entities.

To illustrate, integrating a solution like Nova RIS into your radiology department’s operations can improve compliance with an array of guidelines and standards. Chief radiologists can gain more visibility into your practice’s operations, including modality activities, clinical workflow averaging, CPT reports, and compliance with regulations. This helps in identifying situations that may attract an audit of your business’s practices.

Novarad produces many solutions that comply with the high standards of regulatory guidelines and requirements. These can ensure that your facility adopts top-quality and highly compliant radiology solutions. Eventually, improved monitoring and compliance can improve your facility’s workflows and prevent punitive fines on your facility.

3. Integrate Web-based Image Viewing Solutions

With the increased demand for diagnostic imaging in healthcare, the need for cross-collaboration between practitioners has become of the utmost importance. However, streamlining workflows with conventional image sharing and viewing solutions can be difficult due to compliance, convenience, and interoperability challenges.

Nonetheless, integrating modern and highly compliant web-based image-viewing solutions can help achieve numerous workflow benefits and unlock your business’s potential. Integrating a web-based image viewer enables your facility to reap the benefits that accompany clinical-grade mobile imaging devices. (Note that the latest generation of tablets, phones, and personal computers have become ubiquitous in many imaging environments today.) These benefits include quickly capturing and interlinking images, notes, and videos to existing patient records. This helps improve cross-collaboration and contributes toward improved workflows at your facility.

Investing in an image-viewing solution that’s web-enabled can help improve compliance, thus improving your radiology workflow optimization levels. For instance, investing in a web-enabled image viewer that’s HIPAA compliant improves your workflow by integrating guidelines on data sharing, retention, and storage. By taking advantage of inbuilt compliance monitoring solutions, your staff can concentrate on vital clinical activities, eliminating workflow bottlenecks.

For example, Novarad’s enterprise imaging solution can help your facility leverage Novarad’s web-based and mobile-enabled viewing capabilities. With these features, your imaging team can leverage in-built compliance monitoring and instant information sharing solutions. These features can help optimize your department’s radiology workflow, introducing business benefits like increased productivity, lowered care costs, and improved client retention rates.

Here at Novarad, we believe that the key to a successful imaging center is to work smarter, not harder, to deliver the type of care and outcomes that patients desire.

To see how we can help improve your workflows, feel free to reach out to our workflow specialists today!