Practice Management

Terrie,

We moved IR scheduling to the group's staff to facilitate the efficient use of the IRs.  Our staff was also more intimately aware of which IR was best suited for the procedure. 

We had an outpatient facility and we set up the IR as a resource and assigned the cases to each IR.  This allowed us to block the IR for vacations/hours, etc.  And our scheduling staff knew which IR was primarily assigned to which facility, although they did travel when necessary. 

One major issue is that we had to have someone available 24/7. 

It has been a while since I was working in the practice but I thought- since no one responded, maybe this would help. 

Best of luck, Wendy

Terrie,

I meant to respond to you earlier and was just reminded of your question when Wendy responded.  We have not done this but considered it in the past.  We have closed our imaging center, so we don't have scheduling staff anymore.  We used Medinformatix as our EMR/RIS, and it had some nice features for scheduling.  We were able to integrate the schedule with the physician schedule in Qgenda, through the Qgenda API.  The doctors became a resource in the system.  This allowed us to make sure that certain exams were only scheduled when the radiologist that could perform them was scheduled to work (i.e., MSK ultrasound was only performed by certain radiologists).  The only downfall to the with the Qgenda API is that it will only pull in the next 100 days of the schedule.  The program also lets you define questions to be asked by exam, and you can setup up prompts that the user has to acknowledge when scheduling an exam.  The software has a lot of features to help prevent human error when scheduling.

If you want to consider the software, or have any questions, feel free to contact me directly.  I can point you to a reseller that specializes in Radiology.

Thanks,

Brian Williams

Co-Administrator

Operations

Diagnostic Imaging Associates, Inc.

698 12th St SE

Suite 145

Salem, OR 97301

503-588-2674 - Clinic

503-586-1301 – Fax

Upcoming PTO: January 17^th – 21^st