01 · Why they moved
A system reaching the end of its life
Steph Boyd is Director of Women’s Imaging and is straightforward about the reason: the previous system was coming to end of life, and “the service that we were getting and the needs weren’t being met.” That was the driving factor. The practice talked to several vendors about what would fit its workflow before the move, and the work of implementing followed from there.
- A previous system approaching end of life
- Service and needs not being met on it
- Several vendors considered against their own workflow
- Weekly calls with AbbaDox, super users and IT from before go-live onward
02 · What the front desk handed over
Patients book themselves, and get a text
The change she names first is the one the front desk feels. Patients can schedule their own appointments on the portal, and reminders go out as texts rather than as phone calls somebody has to make. Her words for it are “a huge time saver and work saver”, and the point is not the calls themselves but who was making them: that time “can be used to get to other tasks throughout the day.” Asked what she would tell another imaging center, this is the only thing she names.
- Patients schedule themselves on the patient portal
- Reminders sent by text instead of by staff on the phone
- Front-desk time released to other work in the day
- “Ease of use of our patients”, in her words, as well as staff time
Why it matters
“The ability for the patients to schedule themselves and our staff to not have to be that person to take care of that… I think it’s beneficial for everybody.”
Steph Boyd, Director of Women’s Imaging
Consulting Radiologists, Ltd.
03 · The faxes they could not receive
Orders arriving in the same place as everything else
The plainest gain is the one that sounds smallest. They could send faxes out of the EMR, but they could not receive them into it: inbound faxes landed in a separate internal system and somebody had to go and fetch them. With Fax AI handling the inbound side, orders arrive where the rest of the work already is. Her description is “more like a one-stop shop to find all the orders and everything that we need”, and it has taken paper out of the process.
- Outbound faxing existed; inbound faxing did not
- Inbound orders used to sit in a separate system, fetched by hand
- Orders now arrive alongside the rest of the patient record
- Less paper in the process than before
04 · On the floor
Mammography, ultrasound, DEXA and X-ray, in two minutes
Hailey Johnson books the appointments and walks the whole center on camera: the front desk, the changing rooms, the mammography suite, the ultrasound room where they do “everything from general to breast ultrasounds”, the robed waiting area, the bone density room that measures fracture risk, the consult room and the X-ray room. She also opens the reading room, “looming in the dark”, where outside images from other clinics arrive alongside their own.
- Mammography, ultrasound, bone density and general X-ray on one floor
- Outside images from other clinics read beside their own
- Techs chart, review history and add billing codes in AbbaDox
- The study passed to the radiologist ready to read
Client story