From the January/February 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Let’s use five cents per second as an average radiologist’s cost ($400,000 annually). How many seconds a day do you need to save to pay for a $27,000 to $40,000 workstation? Moreover, how many more exams do you have to read to recover your workstation investment? This is a calculation that all administrators must face, but the bottom line is you can easily save multiple seconds per minute and save multiple minutes per hour if you implement the right technology at the radiologist’s workstation.
Reno Diagnostic reading workstation
Saving just two minutes per hour of a radiologist’s time over 2,080 work hours per year provides an additional 69.3 hours of reading. The efficiency gain creates a substantial increase in throughput for both radiologists and the practice. As a result, we achieved an ROI of 25 months on technology that we will use for five years.
What technology solutions can ensure the greatest productivity for radiologists? Here are a few suggestions:
• Understand how EMR, HIS, RIS and PACS systems are programmed. Are they programmed to take advantage of multicore (8-16 core) processors, or are you better off with a four-core processor? Ask your solution provider. Select the fastest possible processor with the fewest number of cores to exploit the software that is running.
• Find the right diagnostic monitor and the right graphics card for your radiologists’ workstations. Use 4k/5k monitors where diagnostic monitors are not absolutely required by law or recommended by the American College of Radiology (ACR) guidelines. Use 6MP and 8MP monitors wherever possible. Seek monitor vendors that specify high-performance, off-the-shelf, third-party graphics cards.
• Workstations that can be used for all modalities reduce cost, and increased use of these workstations lowers overall ROI time frames and increases exam throughput.
• Consider M.2 interface NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory) over spinning hard drives or 3.5”/2.5” solid-state drives (SSDs).
• Consider gaming keyboards, mice and auxiliary controllers from the same manufacturer. A unified device controller software can manage all the devices (mouse button and shortcut key programming) to reduce conflicts and increase reliability.
• Explore tabletop microphones or headsets to allow both hands to be placed on the mouse and keyboard or auxiliary controller. This reduces hand fatigue and hand movement.
