01 · The arithmetic of an imaging center
You cannot put the price up
Most efficiency stories skip the reason. Michael Eastman does not. An imaging center sells at rates set in advance by contract with its payers, and those contracts move rarely. So when wages rise, or supplies cost more, there is no lever on the revenue side at all: the number the practice is paid for a scan is simply the number.
His illustration is a restaurant, which can look at a $30 steak and decide it is $40 now. A practice cannot. That leaves cost, and within cost it leaves labor, which is both the largest line and the only one that responds to how the work is organized. Which is why software that removes manual steps is not a nice-to-have for a business shaped like this one.
- Rates fixed in advance by payer contract
- Contracts that change only occasionally
- No way to price against rising costs
- Labor: the largest cost, and the only movable one
02 · What he expects to change
Sooner appointments, and fewer surprises at the desk
Derry chose the platform for automation across scheduling: patients booking and completing their information before they arrive, which he expects to get people seen sooner and to shorten the time they spend in the building once they are there.
The part he singles out is error-catching. Today a missing detail surfaces when the patient is standing at the desk, at which point the scan may not be able to go ahead. Catching the same problem days earlier turns a canceled appointment into a phone call. And referring providers get their own view, seeing when their patients are scheduled and getting results sooner, which is what makes follow-up appointments land on time.
- Patients completing their information before arrival
- Appointments sooner, and less time spent at the facility
- Missing details caught days ahead instead of at the desk
- Referring providers seeing schedules and results directly
Why it matters
“It’s not so much that I think the software is going to replace people, but as we grow, we don’t have to add as many people.”
Michael Eastman, Director of Imaging
Derry Imaging
03 · The part that surprised him
Reading the order out of the fax
The capability he was most struck by is the least visible: pulling the contents of an incoming fax or order straight into the record, rather than having staff read each one and type it in. He is blunt that this is where his team’s hours go today, and it is a manual process end to end.
He is also candid that Derry has not switched all of this on yet. The AI capabilities are on his list for after go-live, once the core is settled, which is the normal sequence and worth saying plainly rather than implying a practice adopts everything at once.
- Incoming faxes and orders parsed into the record
- The manual reading and retyping his team does today
- AI capabilities planned for after go-live, not before
- A product he describes as constantly updated
04 · What happened next
Three to four hundred faxes a day, and a search box
Derry went live, and Michael Eastman came back afterwards to describe what it did. The number he puts on the problem is 300 to 400 faxes a day. Before, those arrived first on paper and later as an eFax, which he is careful to say was barely an improvement, because a digital fax was still just a date, a timestamp and a file. Staff opened hundreds of them a day looking for one patient’s order.
Now the contents are read on arrival, so an order is found by patient name or by procedure type instead of by hunting. His example of how far that goes: a typed order arrived with a handwritten ICD-10 code on it, and the diagnosis code was still picked up and attached to the pending appointment. Some referring providers still send handwritten prescriptions, and he says the accuracy on those surprised him.
- 300 to 400 faxes a day
- Paper, then eFax: a file with a timestamp and nothing else
- Staff opening hundreds of files a day to find one order
- Orders now found by patient name or procedure type
- Handwritten ICD-10 codes read off a typed order
05 · Why the implementation is the story so far
Deadlines that were actually met
Because this was recorded mid-project, the thing he can already judge is how the project itself ran, and that is what he is most emphatic about. His baseline is low: he says the practice is used to project deadlines that do not get met and promises about dates that do not hold.
Against that, his verdict is simply that when this team said it would do something, it did it, and did it well. He describes the difference as a real change from other projects they have run. For a director choosing a platform under fixed revenue, that is not a soft benefit: a late implementation is paid for in labor he cannot recover elsewhere.
- A track record of missed deadlines on previous projects
- Commitments met on the dates given
- A platform judged user-friendly for staff and patients alike
- The imaging center and the patient both accounted for
Client story