About Good Shepherd Medical Center
A rural community hospital located in northeast Oregon, Good Shepherd Medical Center is a busy facility that serves the town of Hermiston and its surrounding communities. Founded in 1954, Good Shepherd is a 49-bed facility, with 25 beds reserved for inpatients. As the only imaging center in the area, Good Shepherd’s staff of seven radiologists serve a large outpatient population, and cover all modalities except PET.
A Highly Customizable Solution That Meets Unique Needs
Originally deployed to Good Shepherd in 2002, IntelePACS and InteleViewer have been mainstays in the hospital’s radiology department, providing rapid access to images and industry-leading diagnostic workflow tools that enable them to provide optimal patient care.
Given their rural location, Good Shepherd is a heavy transfer facility located near the junction of two state highways and often the first stop for trauma patients from traffic accidents in the area. These patients, along with those who require specialized treatment or care for extended periods, are often transferred to larger facilities in Washington or Portland. For this reason, Good Shepherd required a solution that easily transferred images across multiple locations. With its Web-based, distributed architecture, Intelerad was able to meet the needs of the hospital.
“Intelerad solutions are truly adaptable which enables them to meet each individual hospital's workflow and specific needs,” said Ann Richards, Good Shepherd’s HIS analyst and PACS administrator. “Instead of just a PACS in a box, it's a PACS that can be tailored to fit whatever your facility needs. That's what has really been beneficial. It's not just ‘this is how we do it, and this is how you have to do it’. It's ‘these are your options’."
Improving KPI Metrics Through IntelePACS' PowerScribe 360 Integration
With only one radiologist on staff at a time, diagnostic imaging staff must work as efficiently as possible to ensure patients receive the highest levels of care. To enhance productivity, Good Shepherd integrated IntelePACS with PowerScribe 360, Nuance’s dynamic radiology reporting and communication platform.
PowerScribe 360 enables continuous quality improvement by streamlining the report delivery cycle and communicating relevant data through radiology speech recognition and transcription, critical test results management, and performance analysis; continuously driving quality of patient care, and business excellence. As an Intelerad partner, Nuance’s solution integrates directly and seamlessly into IntelePACS.
“PowerScribe 360 is a great product and the speech recognition is excellent,” said Richards. The fact that it integrated seamlessly with IntelePACS gives us the best of both worlds.”
For Good Shepherd, this integration eliminated the manual transcription of reports which had been employed previously. Needless to say, this had a major impact on key performance indicators. “The integration has dramatically cut down our turnaround time,” said Richards. “Whereas it formerly took anywhere between 12 to 24 hours to deliver a report, radiologists’ average turnaround time over the course of a week has been five and a half minutes. It’s been a dramatic reduction.”
Reliability Comes From a Stable Solution With Highly Trained Services and Support Teams
In the 11+ years since IntelePACS was deployed at Good Shepherd, the hospital has greatly enjoyed a positive working relationship with Intelerad’s services team.
“It does seem that Intelerad’s services team really does have a vision when you bring ideas to them about changing your setup,” said Richards. “They were able to look forward to the next step and say ‘OK. Well, if you want to do this now but what about in the future? Are you possibly going to want to do this?’ Some things that they bring up, you wouldn't have considered it, or even realized that it's possible. That's helpful.”
That sentiment is echoed when discussing the level of technical support that Intelerad offers.
“When it comes to the level of support, that's where I just say that Intelerad does that really well,” said Richards. “If I have to call their support line, I don’t have to jump through a bunch of hoops, or repeat my story 50 times until I get the right person. The support team is really knowledgeable and helpful with any of our implementation issues.”
Providing Better Patient Care to the Region
Since deploying IntelePACS, Good Shepherd has been able to raise the quality of patient care they provide. This is mainly due to radiology department’s ability to produce reports for referring physicians in a much quicker fashion, and how effectively they can communicate critical results.
“Everyone just loves it, especially the emergency room physcians, as they now go beyond just getting impressions and wet reads from the radiologists,” said Richards. “Now, as soon as the patient comes back over to the ER, they've got the official report. They're getting a more complete read from the images. They're not just getting the quick impression or, ‘Oh, hey, this is fine.’ It's the final report, which makes for an increase in the standard of care we provide.”
With PowerScribe 360 directly integrated into their IntelePACS deployment, Good Shepherd has been able to increase their radiology department’s productivity, while increasing satisfaction amongst staff who use the solution, and those who benefit from it. Most importantly, with the drastic reduction in turnaround time, they are able to deliver better care to the patients who pass through their doors.
April 25, 2024 
