Langlade Hospital, an Aspirus Partner in Antigo, WI, is a 25-bed critical access hospital in a town of 10,000 with a service area of 25,000. JCAHO accredited, the facility has a four-bed intensive care unit, a busy emergency department, and offers ACR-accredited imaging services. The hospital also is affiliated with two clinics in remote areas. Effectively and efficiently managing the radiology needs for the hospital and clinics is critical to patient care and workflow.
For instance, it’s not unusual for a patient to be transferred from the Langlade ED to a higher-level trauma center 60 miles away. By using Philips iSite PACS, the Langlade team can have the initial CT images from its emergency department waiting at the next hospital before the trauma patient arrives. To extend the benefits of its digital radiology workflow to rural clinics, Langlade is now offering iSite PACS to its rural clinics.
According to Howard Graves, PACS/RIS coordinator, “It will help us with report turnaround time. Right now these clinics physically deliver the films, we read them, then send paper reports. Turnaround time can be lengthy.” With the iSite PACS solution in place, Graves and Connie Kiesling, director of radiology, anticipate turnaround times within 24 hours and image distribution across the entire enterprise.
Graves put it into perspective: “The images will be where you want them, when you want them. When you need them at one location, and they’re 40 miles away, it doesn’t do anyone much good. The doctors at the clinics are also looking forward to being able to call and have immediate consults with our radiologist about images they’re able to view onscreen at the same time.”
Kiesling agreed, “You don’t sacrifice quality to send it quickly. The data is never compressed, and the way data is sent gives full fidelity at the end.” Graves continued, “Because we’re a small rural hospital, we have a small IT department. The Philips solution works well for us. They’re monitoring our system 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They can fix a problem we’re not even aware of, and do it in the background. In three years, we’ve never had downtime. Their off-site disaster recovery for HIPAA compliance and fee-per-study model also work well for us.”
According to Kiesling, “When we were looking at PACS vendors, our radiologist actually counted the clicks he had to work through to get to where he wanted to be. With Philips, it was just a couple of clicks.” Graves added, “I’ve looked at a lot of PACS systems. With Philips, everything is very intuitive. When I train physicians new to the system, I can teach them how to view things in about five minutes.”
*Philips does not authorize or approve of use of iSite Radiology or iSite Enterprise with a network not meeting the minimum network specification for these products.