October 11, 2016 — vRad (Virtual Radiologic) announced that it has implemented its first breast imaging Live Video Diagnostics solution site at the Center for Women’s Imaging at Medical Center Hospital (MCH) using Cisco technology.
MCH is a 402-bed regional medical center providing advanced medical services to over 100,000 patients in Odessa, Texas, and the surrounding 17 counties. The solution improves MCH’s mammography coverage and workflow by connecting vRad’s fellowship-trained breast imaging physicians with MCH technologists and patients, helping them to communicate in real time, which leads to faster, personalized and compassionate care when MCH’s onsite breast imaging physicians are unavailable.
Breast imaging patients often experience much tension and anxiety; MCH’s goal is to provide more women with imaging results, quality care and peace of mind as quickly as possible. On designated workdays, vRad’s fellowship-trained, board-certified breast imaging teleradiologists are available at video-enhanced workstations powered by Cisco technology to consult directly with MCH mammography technologists in order to collaborate and review images and radiologist annotations in real time. Consequently, more patients have a better overall experience with higher specialist availability, shorter appointments, minimal wait times for results and fewer callbacks for additional screening.
“Having technologists and patients speaking face-to-face with a radiologist is priceless,” said Carol Evans, RT (R), divisional director of radiology at Medical Center Hospital. “Since we implemented the Live Video Diagnostics program, we have, on average, decreased the duration of patient appointments from about 90 minutes to 30-45 minutes. The new solution site allows us to provide results almost immediately — we either release the patients or, if there is an issue, we send the results to their physician within hours, not days. This significantly improves the overall experience, care and satisfaction for our patients. The additional on-demand coverage to complement our onsite clinicians, as well as the time savings also have allowed us to make more time available to schedule additional patients, which is a great benefit to the women of our community and our hospital.”
The vRad solution site includes Cisco TelePresence technology and end-to-end Cisco network architecture, which prioritizes and carries video traffic with great accuracy in high-definition (HD) formats. This helps enable real-time:
- Video conferencing between vRad’s fellowship-trained breast imaging specialists, technologists and patients;
- Sharing of complex mammography images; and
- Annotating images to articulate and communicate problem areas or findings.
“We see great opportunity in our collaboration with vRad and already have commitment to expand Live Video Diagnostics capabilities to additional hospital sites in California and Virginia. We also are working to expand the solution into additional specialties to change how healthcare is delivered,” said Barbara Casey, global healthcare and life sciences director at Cisco.
For more information: www.vrad.com
April 18, 2024 
