I recently accompanied a patient through an imaging lab. It was a room full of maybe 10 pieces of expensive equipment, and there was a big line of patients in a waiting room. There was one single technician, who handled one patient at a time, kept disappearing, and even when the technician was there, they spent more time convincing the machines to send the images to EMR than actually taking images.
I estimated that they could have gotten at least 4x the throughput (and 4x the utilization of expensive equipment!) if the process was streamlined. For this single patient, at least 45 minutes and probably more was wasted doing what boiled down to nothing of value.
While actually fixing this seems complex, in an emergency situation, I can easily imagine that skipping all the EMR integration and paperwork and just taking the pictures and having someone stand in the room and read the images would have gotten that 4x throughput improvement, even if the person reading the images would personally have lower throughput than if they were in their office.
(Maybe make the 4x into 8x if there could have been two technicians sharing one radiologist.)
>I can easily imagine that skipping all the EMR integration and paperwork and just taking the pictures and having someone stand in the room and read the images would have gotten that 4x throughput improvement
Yes. But 45 minutes later when someone wants to see the images ‘on that guy with the broken leg’ it becomes a nightmare. You need some labelling and a documentation system, and a unique identifier for each patient is a bare minimum. Using the RIS and creating an order isn’t that slow, and quickly becomes a time saver once you’ve got several patients.
45 minutes later that person (or someone else) could be dead because paperwork created a choke point.
The trade off here, again, is reducing overall efficiency (bandwidth) to get the results that are needed now ASAP (latency).
Once the mayhem is over, those patients can have new X-Rays done the next day, the records can be sorted out the next week, etc.
How would you even justify it?
I'm sorry, ma'am, I understand you're in pain and dying after being shot, but waiting a few minutes NOW will really save us some time filing paperwork going forward.
Note that it's not just about the patients getting the X-Rays; with 250+ people arriving at the same time, any delay propagates with cascading effects and delays care for everyone.
Even non-critical patients waiting for their turn creates an issue, since space is limited.
I estimated that they could have gotten at least 4x the throughput (and 4x the utilization of expensive equipment!) if the process was streamlined. For this single patient, at least 45 minutes and probably more was wasted doing what boiled down to nothing of value.
While actually fixing this seems complex, in an emergency situation, I can easily imagine that skipping all the EMR integration and paperwork and just taking the pictures and having someone stand in the room and read the images would have gotten that 4x throughput improvement, even if the person reading the images would personally have lower throughput than if they were in their office.
(Maybe make the 4x into 8x if there could have been two technicians sharing one radiologist.)