Proving your worth

Justine Cadet, Executive Editor

When examining how to better manage the processes and advanced imaging data across a healthcare enterprise, administrators are going to have to take a business savvy approach to their practices, said presenters at this week’s AHRA conference in Dallas.

When James T. Timpe, MS, RT, and Airica Steed, RN, MBA, both of Advocate Condell Medical Center, Libertyville, Ill. first considered a process improvement initiative at their facility, they faced hefty challenges, including: ranking in the bottom quartile of patient satisfaction; a report turn-around time in excess of 16 hours; a high percentage of denials and bad debt; a 6 percent no-show rate; negative growth; a high percentage of abandoned or lost appointments; a cumbersome registration process; elongated patient wait times; and low staff and physician morale.

To counteract these challenges, they adopted Lean management tactics, which were originally rolled out at Toyota. One year after the launch of the project, the hospital reported:

• Greater than top quartile in customer satisfaction;
• Reduced report turn around to less than four hours;
• Reduced no shows from 6 percent to less than 2 percent;
• Greater than 8 percent year-over-year profitable growth;
• Reduced abandoned/lost calls from 30 percent to less than 8 percent;
• Reduced patient wait time from more than 30 minutes to less than 10 minutes;
• Greater than 50 percent improvement in staff and physician satisfaction; and
• Confirmed year-over-year return on investment of $1.75 million.

Hospitals need to understand and employ better tactics for advanced imaging on an enterprise as well as department level. Separate AHRA Presenter Robert T. Sill, practice manager at Lancaster Radiology Associates in Auburn, Pa., predicted that “imaging will be driven back to the hospital setting,” as a result of healthcare reform.

Sill also said that imagers will need to “prove the value in imaging.”

How can this be achieved? Through improved confirmed diagnoses, better patient outcomes and underscoring the importance of the radiologist in this role, which can be assisted through advanced visualization technologies like computer-aided detection (CAD).

For instance, a recent trial found that a CAD program improved all 12 participating radiologists’ detection of lung nodules on x-ray, while averaging 2.6 false-positives per image, offering potentially promising results for the temporal subtraction method for CAD.

Such innovative, technologically driven techniques will assist in propelling the radiologist’s role and improving patient care. Tell us about how you are utilizing advanced visualization to better the enterprise and demonstrate radiology's value.

Justine Cadet
jcadet@trimedmedia.com