>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.
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.