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Heart & Vascular
Center of Bradenton
Bradenton, Fl. |
| As published in Radiology
Today July 19th 2004 issue. |
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| Dr. Joe
Branconi & Donovan Copeman
RDMS |
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| Key
& Donovan HVCB US Techs at Framegrabber
workstations. |
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Small and medium sized imaging
facilities often hope to ease into PACS by
going digital one modality at a time. In contrast
the Heart and Vascular Center of Bradenton
(HVCB), Florida, specifically, sought the
independent consulting and integration firm
PCCG, Inc. to help them move directly from
analog to digital as swiftly and seamlessly
as possible. HVCB compromises 4 cardiologists,
including on interventionalist, performing
approximately 5,000 outpatient studies annually.
“We’re what you could call a small
practice but we have a large volume”
notes Donovan Copeman, RDMS, director of ultrasound.
“I came from a digital lab, and after
a couple of years, I had to tell {the doctors},
I can’t work effectively in analog”
Initially the physicians were reluctant to
move to PACS, partly because of the expected
expense; they prefer spending money on employees
rather than on equipment. That is one reason
Copeman choose to work with PCCG. “[I
found] Many of the bigger companies can’t
customize to your needs, whether your small
or big.” Instead Copeman says, he particularly
appreciated PCCG’s responsiveness to
his group’s individual requirements.
“[They] matched product to volume perfectly.
With the right product even a small practice
can go digital without a quarter of a million
dollar cost.”
The PCCG installation uses a web based dedicated
PACS server and DICOM US framegrabber workstations
to integrate the analog HP Agilent 5500 ultrasound
station. With Terabyte of storage Copeman
finds the systems vast capacity as valuable
as it’s speed because it’s enabled
the group to completely eliminate “a
huge volume” of other media, with associated
hardware and costs. He estimates it should
be 7years before we have to dump the hard
spinning online disk media” –
even better the system allows automatic archiving
to DVD. “ as we move through the month
all of our studies are already backed up.
If a patient wants a copy of an exam now we
just shoot one and hand them a CD almost before
they leave, and if we want to look at any
study, we can just pull it up on the server
no retrieving tape or rewinding”
Remote reading capabilities from virtually
any location also helped convince the physicians
to take the plunge into full digital. Plans
include adding electronic medical record capabilities
within the next few months and eventually
implementing RIS. “ People feel like
they are not big enough to go digital, but
that’s a mistake! You really cannot
afford not to go digital with all the cost
and time benefits. Whether your doing 40 studies
a month or 10,000 a year [working with the
right company can help]” says Copeman.
Article and text used from
Writer: J.K. Bucsko
a freelance healthcare and technical writer
and editor based in Westville, NJ.
Article from July 19th issue of
Radiology
Today Magazine
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