How a PocketHealth Community Gateway Enables Seamless Image Sharing Between Guadalupe Regional Medical Center (GRMC) and Methodist Hospital
January 8, 2024
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After an overhaul of their radiology practice in 2023 left Jefferson County Health Center (JCHC) without an efficient and reliable way to transfer patient imaging records to their top referral sites, they had no choice but to revert back to CD burning.
This negatively affected patient experience and increased workload of already overburdened staff. With no time to waste, JCHC quickly partnered with PocketHealth to seamlessly share imaging and reports with referring sites. We spoke with JCHC’s CIO, Tim Belec on the challenges his team faced and how a quick implementation with PocketHealth helped them get back doing what they do best: providing the highest standard of care to their patients.
A move to a new radiology practice left JCHC without a reliable way to transfer imaging records between referral sites, burdening already scarce staff resources and negatively affecting patient care.
Tim Belec: “Before I started in 2023, a decision was made to move to the largest radiology practice in the U.S. When the contract was originally crafted, no allowance was made for connecting to the sites that we do the most business with from a referral standpoint.
As a result, we had to revert to burning CDs—it quickly became a real problem. Sometimes those CDs were sent directly with the ambulance transferring patients and had any of that patient information ever been lost or not delivered to the right person, we could have had a HIPAA violation on our hands. The patient experience during this time was not good and we wanted to improve it.”
Implementing PocketHealth for Providers, reducing costs and clerical intervention from staff.
Tim Belec: “We were paying enormous costs to burn anywhere from 20 to 50 CDs per day, on top of having to pay to courier them overnight. We’re talking up to 1000 CDs a month! It was a big expense and an added workload to already overworked rad techs. Nobody was happy with having to do it.
We tried to set up VPN connections with some of our referring sites, but there was a lot of complexity with the specific systems used by each site. We were burning an enormous amount of resources trying to make this work. We needed to find a better solution.”
Tim Belec: “We had a chat with our PACS vendor to see which solutions they would be comfortable supporting, and that narrowed down the field to one of the leading image exchange providers and PocketHealth. We went through the demo process and got quotes from each.
What it really came down to was everyone on the team felt the PocketHealth solution was much easier to work with and understand. Not to mention, PocketHealth offers network agnostic sharing, which meant we could stop sending out CDs to our referral sites and instead just share an access page.
On top of these reasons, the other vendor was also 3 times the cost of PocketHealth. It made the decision to move forward with PocketHealth a no-brainer.
It became clear just how intuitive it is to use PocketHealth when we went through team training—which only took half an hour! The other vendor was quoting a minimum of 4 one-hour sessions! Their solution just seemed overly complex with too many steps.”
Saving an estimated $60K in annual costs and 1,092 hours per year by eliminating CDs, while improving the JCHC’s radiology department patient satisfaction scores by 7.65%.
Tim Belec: “When we went live with PocketHealth earlier this year, burning CDs instantly ended, which saved our radiology team over 3 hours a day. I know the rad tech’s really love PocketHealth. They use it constantly and appreciate not having to burn CDs anymore.
Our physicians, especially the newer ones that we brought on board, love it too. They see it as technology that’s innovative and helps them do their job. So they’re on board with it and want to continue to find ways to enhance it.
Patients have also benefited from more timely care. In many cases, images are arriving and being reviewed at referral sites before the patient even gets there. And whenever we refer a patient, we now know that the information is being securely shared with the right receiver, so there’s no risk of a HIPAA scare.
We track patient satisfaction scores for our radiology department, and their scores have improved by 7.65% since we implemented PocketHealth, so I would say your team has something to do with that improvement.”
Tim Belec: “We’ve started building out Community Gateways to the sites that we refer to the most. We have a list of 10 major sites, with 3 of those sites having gateways built.
We’re already live with one of those gateways at a local outpatient imaging center. Our partners there can now simply hit a button and send those images directly. That time improvement alone is improving the workflow process for the rad tech.
Overall, it’s been a pleasure working with the PocketHealth team. They’re very responsive and knowledgeable. It’s a breath of fresh air compared to some of the other vendors I work with. You have to constantly call them to make sure that they follow through. But with PocketHealth, it’s one call and it’s done.”
Interested in learning more about how PocketHealth improves the image-sharing process for providers while improving the patient experience? Book a demo.
September 28, 2023
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