Excerpt

Introduction

Today, radiology business practices face a challenging dilemma: how to meet increasingly dynamic customer expectations and satisfy the requirements of many regulations, all while cutting costs and preventing burnout among the staff. Since radiology business models have been shaped by fee-for-service payment policies, more radiology business practices are experiencing challenges trying to find a balance. As a result, radiology departments, whose models were anchored on reimbursement for the volume of services offered, experience problems trying to adopt a value-based approach that places more emphasis on the quality of services rendered.

Despite the dilemma, the radiology space continues striving toward making healthcare more effective. The push towards more effective healthcare is anchored on the value-based healthcare (VBH) framework. This refers to a healthcare delivery solution that encourages care providers to emphasize the quality of services rather than the quantity of services delivered. Under the value-based approach, care providers—like physicians and radiologists—receive compensation based on patient health outcomes rather than the volume of unit services offered.

In medical imaging, the push toward effective healthcare has translated to improving diagnostic accuracy while lowering administered doses and improving efficiency to minimize healthcare costs. With radiology being a major component of healthcare and greatly impacting treatment outcomes, it has significantly impacted the adoption of value-based care. Radiology plays an essential role in ensuring the effective adoption of the VBH framework and its benefits. By adopting VBH-related concepts, radiology departments can contribute to improved patient outcomes.

Given the significance of radiology in modern healthcare and maintaining high-quality standards in healthcare, diagnostic imaging services have much to offer in terms of delivering high-quality care. Put into context, medical imaging is deeply embedded in modern patient care and plays an essential role in service delivery at all levels of healthcare service. From investigation to primary care and complex hospital-based care, most care episodes require radiologist inputs to improve the quality of care. Therefore, it’s crucial for healthcare facilities to assess the value derived from radiology to determine the most appropriate investment in equipment and facilities that can support radiology departments.

How Do Radiology and Radiology Technologies Deliver Value in Healthcare?

While radiology and radiology technologies are relied upon extensively in healthcare, some hospital administrators may not understand the key role of diagnostic imaging and diagnostic technologies in healthcare facilities. So, how can radiology deliver value to healthcare in terms of helping the achievement of value-based healthcare outcomes? 

Radiology and radiology technologies deliver value by supporting disease prevention. With radiology expertise and resources, healthcare providers can easily screen biomarkers to ascertain the presence or absence of diseases. With appropriate imaging technology, healthcare facilities can also conduct confirmation tests before expensive medical procedures, helping cut unnecessary healthcare costs. The adoption of technologies helps in sharing imaging reports, preventing the need for duplicate studies and associated costs.

The radiology department also improves the accuracy of diagnosis in healthcare. It helps in staging diseases, facilitating the development of suitable approaches to managing a specific disease. With appropriate radiology technologies, healthcare facilities can benefit from increased multispeciality collaboration. This further enhances the accuracy and effectiveness of life-saving procedures, like image-guided biopsies. Eventually, improved diagnoses enhance patient outcomes, ensuring that patients derive maximum value from healthcare.

Furthermore, radiology delivers value by facilitating the delivery of effective therapeutic solutions. During treatment, physicians need to assess the effectiveness of adopted treatment plans. With effective medical imaging teams and technology, physicians can accurately determine a patient’s progress, helping make suitable decisions. 

Effective monitoring of a patient’s therapy helps identify and utilize imaging biomarkers, helping the accurate prediction of responses to treatment and reducing the adoption of highly invasive testing and treatment procedures. Minimally invasive diagnostic and treatment procedures facilitate quick recovery. Over time, this translates to better patient outcomes, helping increase the value that patients derive from healthcare.

Other areas where radiology and imaging technologies deliver value include teleradiology, communication with patients and other stakeholders, and other non-diagnostic activities, like collaboration, research, and the sharing of key findings between multispeciality practitioners.

The Challenges That Affect Radiology Business Practices and How to Succeed

Improving radiology business practices is vital in improving the quality of service and maximizing patient outcomes. Inefficiencies in radiology business practices introduce delays, cause inaccurate diagnostic reports, lead to the adoption of highly invasive diagnostic and treatment procedures, and demoralize staff.

While radiology business practices involve numerous activities, challenges affecting radiology business practices have significant effects on the ability of radiology practices to add value to the healthcare continuum.

So, evaluating several workflow-related challenges that affect your radiology business practices will help clarify what could be affecting your practice’s success.

1. Having High Examination Volumes
The increased demand for diagnostic imaging due to its importance and increased awareness among patients has been a plus toward improving healthcare outcomes. However, for radiology departments, increased exam volumes may spell doom.

Notably, an increase in the volume of examinations performed in the radiology department can introduce workflow inefficiencies. Given the rising emphasis on cutting healthcare costs in many healthcare facilities, your radiology team may face challenges meeting pre-set service-level agreements. Budgetary constraints may hinder the optimization of the radiology department’s resources. In particular, they may hinder the hiring of specialized staff and the acquisition of the equipment needed to help reduce examination backlogs. Eventually, this adversely impacts your facility’s workflow efficiency.

High examination volumes per radiologist in your facility can increase the likelihood of false positives and increased re-examination rates. With poorly equipped radiology departments and inadequate staff, your radiology department may experience challenges that take up additional examination requests, affecting your facility’s workflow. Overly stretched human resources and a lack of decision support systems may lead to errors in your facility. Increased re-test rates contribute to inefficient workflow processes, affecting your facility’s radiology business practices.

Radiology departments can overcome workflow-related inefficiencies that result from increased exam volumes by adopting tech solutions with patient and workflow management systems. With solutions that can offer easy integration with picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) and workflows driving by electronic health records (EHRs), your radiology facility can easily communicate details about exam schedules, patient requests, and order completion. 

Additionally, adopting technology that enables remote access to different patient records can help radiologists access important documents from any location. This reduces the legwork and time needed to move between departments or facilities to correct files that are needed for diagnostic reports. Ultimately, the integration of real-time patient management systems enables your facility to increase its productivity, cut wait times, and improve workflow efficiency.

2. Working with Disparate Systems
Many radiology facilities are working with disconnected systems. The lack of interoperability between systems and challenges in complying with standards like IHE, HL7, and DICOM are partially to blame for the problem.

The absence of interoperability and challenges in complying with standards on the sharing of information introduces workflow challenges in radiology businesses. It’s worth noting that highly customized PACS limit sharing of vital patient records, creating workflow-related challenges within and outside your radiology department. Within your facility, disparate systems can hinder the sharing of vital reports between the radiology department and other essential departments. Outside your facility, disparate systems hinder the timely collaboration between physicians with different specialties. This limits the ability of your imaging facility to achieve key performance indicators (KPIs). 

The use of disparate systems that are not interoperable with other information systems also limits the capability of your facility to exploit benefits linked to artificial intelligence (AI) and big data. With more healthcare facilities relying on big data and AI to unlock efficiencies, using systems that are not interoperable with those in other facilities limits your workflow processes.

To clarify, failure to use technologies that can interconnect with those in other facilities prevents the effective use of big data analytics and AI algorithms in your radiology department. Your facility cannot exploit benefits linked with real-time analysis of patient health data.

Fortunately, radiology solutions and DICOM standards are available to radiology departments, helping such facilities enjoy the benefits associated with increased interoperability. With DICOM-compliant radiology solutions, your radiology facility can easily interface with PACS and EHRs on networks from various vendors. The increased interconnectivity also helps your radiology system deploy AI and big data algorithms effectively. With increased access to patient data, your facility can exploit the benefits associated with timely decision-making. A key benefit that your facility gains is the ability to access and analyze data in crucial areas like precision medicine, diagnosis, and treatment of rare diseases. This helps in tailoring treatment plans for different patients, improving your facility’s treatment outcomes.

Also, the introduction of novel technologies that deal with disparate departments and information systems has been a game-changer for healthcare facilities. With an enterprise imaging solution like NCompass, your facility can leverage integrated information systems and centralized imaging to overcome the problem of working with disparate systems. With the integrated information systems, physicians can easily view patient records and determine appropriate treatment plans. This results in better outcomes.

Overall, your radiology business practices can overcome the “how to succeed” dilemma by investing in technology that interlinks different PAC and EHR systems. Subsequently, this makes it possible for your facility to leverage game-changing solutions like AI and big data.

3. Accommodating Multiple Workflows

Regardless of your radiology department’s size, it often deals with different workflows that run simultaneously with various modalities. Often, this introduces bottlenecks in the management of patients across the healthcare continuum. With more bottlenecks, patients visiting your facility experience longer wait times and probably higher costs of care due to inefficiencies in your radiology business practices.

What’s more, multiple workflows within radiology businesses make it challenging to respond appropriately to variations in radiology volumes. With the volume of radiology procedures and their complexities varying from case to case, balancing your facility’s capacity and maintaining effective workflows can be a problem. Notably, with different procedures requiring different durations, patients may not understand why some patients take a long time to receive their results while others just need a few moments. This may introduce dissatisfaction among patients, increasing client turnover at your facility.

A miscalculation in managing different workflows can also impede your radiology workflow in a big way. Failure to optimize your team’s performance and the inability to control differing workflows introduces delays that ultimately affect treatment outcomes. Without adequately getting frontline staff in the workflow optimization process, different measures taken to manage different workflows may not be effective. Senior management teams in radiology departments may not effectively manage different patient demands.

While managing varying workflows may seem challenging, all is not doom and groom for your facility. Particularly, with the inception of radiology solutions that help optimize workflows, your facility can beat problems associated with different workflows by investing in digital radiology systems. Such systems can eliminate workflow bottlenecks in your facility and help manage patient expectations and direct staff toward achieving specific KPIs.

4. Balancing Workload

Modern systems promise to lower workloads in radiology departments. However, the workload trends have progressed in an entirely unfathomed direction, and many radiology departments bemoan the increased workloads. The rise in workloads is partly associated with the high demand for quality healthcare, an increase in the world’s aging population, and the increased reliance on techno-diagnostic systems to identify ailments. These factors have made it essential for heads of radiology to develop strategies that are effective in balancing workloads for their staff. Failure in balancing workload translates to an inefficient radiology department. In turn, inefficient radiology systems translate to delayed diagnostic reports, examinations of fewer patients, untimely treatment plans, and an overall deterioration of the quality of care at your facility. 

However, your radiology department can invest in digital workflows to eliminate the challenges associated with unbalanced workloads in your facility. For instance, the integration of systems that enable physicians and patients to make appointments via online platforms reduces the workload on your staff. Online appointment systems integrated into the radiology information system calendar can inform your patients of upcoming appointments, helping them prepare on time. Also, text and email reminders to patients can help radiology departments seek additional information before an appointment. This eliminated delays that occasion the sourcing of files for different facilities or physicians. Timely management of appointments and the required patient records help speed up your diagnostic imaging processes. Eventually, this benefits your facility by reducing backlogs, since radiologists can easily deal with numerous patients.

Improving Radiology Business Practices: How to Succeed with Novarad’s Radiology Solutions

Improving your radiology business practices is not an exercise that you can wish away. It’s also not a process that you should complete by cutting corners and going for substandard solutions. Working with a leading medical imaging company like Novarad’s Corporation will help your facility create long-term benefits and have a competitive edge in the radiology space. With Novarad’s solutions, your radiology business will improve its business practices delivering operational, clinical, and fiscal excellence. Due to their more than three decades of tech leadership, the corporation has solutions that once adopted, can help your facility improve efficiencies while working with customer and facility-centered solutions.

That said, here are several strategies that can help your heads of radiology answer these queries: how to improve radiology business practices and how to succeed in the radiology space.

1. Simplify and secure medical information sharing with a modernized solution

The need for patients and care providers to share and exchange imaging is currently more important than ever. It has prompted many radiology facilities to seek solutions that can help streamline the sharing of vital data. With previous solutions relying on insecure means of communication and cumbersome CDs to share vital patient records, few facilities have managed to adapt to the recent changes in the radiology space. This has hindered the effective delivery of high-quality radiology services.

While challenges abound in many healthcare departments, you can simplify and secure medical information sharing with a leading solution. For instance, investing in CryptoChart can be a game-changer. With this award-winning solution, your facility can instantly share images with referring physicians and patients. That’s made possible by using a highly encrypted QR code rather than CDs.

What’s more, CryptoChart can work with DICOM images from a PACS or modality. The system receives, compresses, encrypts, and sends DICOM images to

Novarad Object Vault cloud system. Then, the Object Vault cloud system sends back a highly encrypted, easily shareable, and time-limited QR code to your networked printer. With the printed QR code, patients can view and share their diagnostic images with ease. Investing in the solution can help boost multispecialty collaboration, improve client and referring physician relations, and ultimately improve treatment outcomes.

Ramapo Radiology Associates is an example of a facility that adopted CryptoChart and is reaping the benefits therein. According to Steven Ryerson, Ramapo’s IT

director, sharing CDs for close to 100,000 exams per year was burdensome. With the process of burning CDs taking ten to fifteen minutes, the image sharing process was brutally slow. However, upon investing in CryptoChart, physicians at the facility saved more than 10 minutes opening a single study. That was made possible by CryptoChart QR codes, which open up images much faster.

That said, investing in the novel image-sharing solution can enable your facility to improve productivity, relations with patients and referring physicians, and treatment outcomes.

2. Lower operational costs with enterprise imaging software

Today, healthcare payments are capitated and bundled together more than ever. This implies that each re-examination of a patient at your facility due to misdiagnosis harms your profit margins. Maximizing accuracy within your facility— during the medical imaging and diagnosis processes—reduces the possibility of re-examination. In turn, this reduces operational costs at your facility, helping you achieve your profitability goals.

Controlling downstream costs through improved radiology business processes helps your facility to offer great prices for radiology services. With patients being more informed of the prices offered at different competing facilities due to the internet, imaging providers need to control their operational costs to attract more patients and referring physicians. Some healthcare insurance companies tend to steer clients toward facilities offering competitive prices. Therefore, failure to control your imaging prices may see more clients being directed to your competitors’ facilities.

It’s paramount that your facility stays abreast with the latest trends in image capture software. To cut operational costs, your facility has to invest in a leading enterprise imaging software. This will help your facility cut unnecessary costs, helping you offer high-quality services at competitive prices.

But how can Ncompass’s enterprise imaging software help cut operational costs? Investing in the software can help your facility reduce image migration costs and IT costs incurred when managing different data silos. Ncompass can help your facility create complete patient records while improving data security and HIPAA compliance. This is achieved by helping your facility transition the storage of patient images and records to the Ncompass vendor-neutral archive (VNA). A VNA helps your facility store medical images and reports in a format that’s easily accessible by other radiology solutions. VNAs are indexed by your patients, improving access to patient records across the care continuum and improving your facility’s workflow. These benefits have the ultimate effect of reducing costs for your faculty. 

Novarad’s enterprise imaging solution also integrates a universal viewer. The Ncompass Universal Viewer is a patient-centered, zero-footprint, and HTML-5-compliant viewer that’s accessible on any web and internet-connected device. With the Universal Viewer, your facility can image-enable your electronic medical records. This facilitates multispeciality collaboration and eases access to DICOM and non-DICOM healthcare data. Your facility’s documents are stored in a single VNA and are easily accessible via web-enabled devices. You can cut costs that are needed to manage different data silos and huge information technology teams.

Developed for reliability, Ncompass’s archive also incorporates cost-cutting systems that help your facility with life-cycle management. By incorporating on- and off-site storage systems, the enterprise imaging solution helps cut hardware costs and eliminate expensive disruptions caused by systems failure or information loss. With unmatched reliability and uptime, your facility improves its workflow, maximizes efficiency, and delivers high-quality services. These benefits help lower your operational costs and improve your facility’s competitive edge. 

3. Streamline your radiology business practices with integrated management reporting

Investing in a radiology solution that has an integrated management reporting system can be a game-changer for your facility. With this type of reporting, your facility can leverage real-time data, helping you make appropriate changes. With integrated management reporting, heads of radiology can adjust caseloads more efficiently.

For instance, investing in Novarad’s radiology information system (Nova RIS) enables your facility to reap the benefits associated with the company’s integrated management reporting system. With the solution’s integrated management reporting, directors of radiology can easily track patient information, assess exam statuses and procedures being used by referring physicians, and view payment-related information. Your facility can also identify potential imaging problems like incomplete examinations or missing insurance information. Identifying potential problems before they occur helps your facility avoid delays and wastage of resources. Ultimately, this improves your facility’s competitive edge, maximizes profitability, and ensures that your facility adds value to healthcare.

Investing in Nova RIS helps your radiology team leverage doctor portals and their benefits. Notably, with the portals, physicians can easily schedule appointments, access various medical images and reports, and offer directions to referred patients from their homes to your facility. The portals can also help your physicians review procedure instructions with ease. Given the efficiencies unblocked by simplifying highly essential procedures for your radiology team, your facility eliminates barriers that affect your radiology workflow processes. With the integrated management system, your clinicians can also identify erroneous data when reviewing procedure instructions, helping them avoid re-tests, which can be expensive to your facility.

With Nova RIS, your facility enables your patients to self-schedule procedures and appointments at their most convenient times. Noting that no-shows adversely affect a facility’s revenue, introduces delays in patient care, and leads to the underutilization of a radiology department’s staff and resources, having a system that minimizes no-shows is a gamechanger. In this light, a self-scheduling system for your patients fits this bill. Thanks to Nova RIS’s integrated management reporting capabilities, patient self-scheduling capabilities, and configurable appointment reminders, your facility can severely cut no-show rates, preventing the underutilization of highly skilled staff. Eventually, this streamlines your radiology business practices, maximizing revenue, improving customer satisfaction, and adding value to healthcare.

Nova RIS also incorporates AlertView. With this highly secure system, referring physicians are notified when patient diagnostic reports are complete, enabling swift responses in patient care. The resulting benefits increase your facility’s competitiveness in the radiology space, enabling your facility to wrestle more business from competitors and attract more time-conscious referring physicians. Ultimately, this translates to better bottom lines for your facility.

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!