MR Therapy Centre
MR Therapy Centre Sees Increase in Referrals Since Adopting Visbion IPACS
The MR Therapy Centre is based at the world-renowned hospital, St Mary’s, in Paddington, London. It was established to enable Magnetic Resonance-guided Focused Ultrasound (MRgFUS) treatment of uterine fibroids to be offered as a clinical service, and to allow the continuation of a research programme into new applications using this innovative therapy. The Centre is the UK’s first, and most experienced, centre for MRgFUS.
The Centre also provides an efficient and high quality Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) diagnostic service to private patients referred by an appropriate medical clinician.
The day-to-day operation of the unit is led by Professor Wladyslaw Gedroyc, MBBS MRCP and FRCR, Director and Consultant Radiologist, and Casey Murray, Unit Manager.
The challenge at the MR Therapy Centre
The majority of the MRI scans performed at the Centre are for private patients where it is imperative that the clinical report is written within a day or two of the scan being completed. In order to provide a report of the highest quality, the MR Therapy Centre outsources the reporting to leading consultants in their fields. The Centre uses a local partnership of around 15 consultants at St. Mary’s Hospital, who between them have the expertise in the various clinical specialities that are needed.
Casey Murray explained “Arranging for the report to be done within these tight timescales can prove challenging, particularly when any of the consultants are away from work, whether on a planned or unplanned basis. In the highly competitive central London private healthcare sector, it is essential that our turnaround times are at least as good as those of our competitors”
A second problem is associated with getting the report and the MR images to referring clinicians. This is particularly the case for those consultants who work in many different locations during the week. In the past this was typically done by sending a CD-ROM by post to the consultant at his private practice as with file sizes of 250Mb, most scans are too large to send via email. There are also storage and disposal problems for the referring clinicians who are having hundreds of patient CDs accumulate at their practices.
Time for Change
Professor Gedroyc and Casey Murray recognised that in order to offer a first class service and to further grow the private patient MR scanning business, they needed to streamline working practices. Referring doctors are looking for turnaround times to be a rapid as possible so that they can offer the very best service to their patients and the Centre needed to respond to this demand.
Having evaluated the situation, Visbion were able to offer a choice of two solutions, provided by their Image World solution:
1. A local server onto which images would be loaded
2. A fully hosted solution utilising a remote server in a secure data centre onto which images would be uploaded.
Both of these options would include Visbion’s Image Web software to enable viewing and reporting of images from any web enabled PC or workstation.
Professor Gedroyc said of the decision making process “We considered the upfront investment cost associated with owning our own server, and the rental payments associated with the hosted solution. We preferred the second solution because it avoided an upfront cost, and the administrative hassles of having to look after our own server, and also the risk of theft of the server (and, much more importantly, possible loss of patient data)”
Images are acquired by the MRI scanner and uploaded to Image World using a dedicated Visbion Workstation. Using a fast broadband connection, a typical MR scan takes only 10 minutes to upload and once uploaded it can be retrieved for viewing in a matter of seconds.
The installation was straightforward and the team found the Visbion system quick to learn and easy to use. The solution offers the Centre a quick, simple, cost-effective way to meet the demanding needs of their business.
Improving efficiency
Casey Murray said “We can easily arrange for scans to be sent for reporting, or viewing, using the system. As a result, the system has helped us improve our turnaround times, and consequently the service that we can offer the referring clinicians and their patients.
Several of our reporting clinicians are happy to be able to work from home. They have been able to use their existing PC’s and broadband connections, and the only necessary expense has been to provide them with a high resolution monitor.”
One of the Centre’s referring clinicians works in several different practices each week. He can now make the most of the system’s flexibility by viewing the images at any location that he is at that has a PC and broadband access. This enables him to enhance the service that he provides to his patients because he can view the images as soon as he receives an email advising that it is available. The report is also included with the email, thereby avoiding the need to wait for anything to arrive by post and by receiving the data electronically it also avoids the inconvenience of filing hundreds of CDs with patient details on them.
Other referring clinicians are now being approached to see if they would like to receive their images electronically, rather than on a CD by post, as at present.
Business Growth
Professor Gedroyc concludes “Our private patient MR business has been steadily growing over the last 2 years, and we attribute this largely to the adoption of the Visbion system, owing to the faster and more reliable service that we can now offer to our referring clinicians.”
Visbion‘s expertise lies in providing a solution that fully meets the complex and unique environments of hospitals and clinics of all sizes. The reliability and flexibility of its products combined with the quality of service are key factors in the company’s continued success.
