The Customer
Huntington Beach Diagnostic Imaging and Breast Center (HBDI), located in Huntington Beach, California is a state-of-the-art imaging practice located adjacent to Huntington Beach Hospital. HBDI was originally part of Huntington Beach Hospital until the Hospital decided to sell the practice to Dr. Nasser Rahbar, a renowned radiologist. Dr. Rahbar opened Huntington Beach Diagnostic Imaging and Breast Center to provide in-patient and out-patient imaging services.
As the owner and Medical Director of HBDI, Dr. Rahbar primarily provides outpatient imaging services and leverages the proximity to Huntington Beach Hospital to also offer inpatient imaging services on an as needed basis. His commitment to guaranteeing quality care to all patients is done through the continuous effort to improve workflow and the high standards that he and his team have established. In a short amount of time, the name Huntington Beach Diagnostic Imaging and Breast Center has become synonymous with superior patient care and service, availability, and quality imaging.
HBDI modalities include CT, MRI, CR, Mammography, Nuclear Medicine and Ultrasound.
The Challenge
Soon after acquiring HBDI, Dr. Rahbar was faced with multiple decisions on his investments in new imaging modalities and technologies. Dr. Rahbar and his staff were also not pleased with the lack of features and functionalities of their current RIS/PACS. Dr. Rahbar knew that he needed a fully integrated full-featured RIS/PACS to streamline his operations and provide him with ability to read studies quickly and provide reports in a timely manner. In addition, in order to grow the practice, he needed to vastly improve report distribution with referring physicians and provide them with the ability to view studies and reports very easily. In talking to various vendors,
In addition, expensive annual maintenance contracts as well as the need for an onsite IT resource to manage the RIS/PACS, had to be kept in mind and budgeted. Some of the other RIS/PACS vendors were also going to charge him extra if he ever exceeded certain number of studies per year. A number of vendors had also submitted proposals whereby his upfront costs would be low but in return, he would be charged on a per study basis. Dr. Rahbar felt that paying for a RIS/PACS on a per study basis would leave him at the mercy of the vendor and that he would be making payments with no end in sight. Making the right RIS/PACS decision was going to be critical to the long-term prospects of HBDI.
The Solution
Dr. Rahbar came across Candelis at the Los Angeles Radiological Society (LARS) conference and was quickly impressed with the cost-effective and yet feature-rich ImageGrid™ RIS/PACS system. Dr. Rahbar had an opportunity to talk to several existing customers of Candelis and was pleased to hear that they were very happy with the solution as well as Candelis’ customer centric philosophy. The ImageGrid’s price point was a fraction of other solutions and its PACS solutions could implemented and maintained with minimal IT supervision. For the first time, Dr. Rahbar realized that he could quantify the total cost of ownership of a RIS/PACS and it would allow him to better plan for the growth of his new imaging practice. Dr. Rahbar was also pleased that with ImageGrid PACS, there are no additional fees to connect new modalities or workstations.
Dr. Rahbar decided to implement the ImageGrid RIS/PACS in two phases. The ImageGrid PACS with 4.5 TB of archive storage was implemented within 1 day and all modalities were easily configured to send studies to it. In addition, the ASTRA Referring Physician Viewer was configured to provide easy web-enabled viewing of patient studies for the center’s referring physicians. ImageGrid’s Advanced Radiology and Mammography viewers also provided Dr. Rahbar with all the tools and capabilities to read from the office or from home.
A few months after the successful implementation of ImageGrid PACS, ImageGrid RIS was implemented. ImageGrid RIS is designed to streamline and improve the radiology workflow and ensure the timely and accurate dissemination of information to appropriate personnel. As a web-enabled application residing on the ImageGrid system, the RIS module allows radiologists, technologist and staff to better manage and access patient data and information from a single platform. ImageGrid RIS can be accessed from any workstation on a local network. As a comprehensive workflow-driven solution, ImageGrid RIS is tightly integrated with ImageGrid PACS and captures every process from patient registration to final report delivery. The voice-recognition module allows radiologists to dictate studies and generate reports in a very efficient and timely manner. The optional Mammography Tracking Module captures specific workflow issues and requirements of Mammography, such as exam results, pathology results, follow-ups and statistical reports.
In order to comply with HIPAA requirements, HBDI is seamlessly backing up all patient data on their ImageGrid RIS/PACS to the ASTRA Cloud.
The Result
The ImageGrid PACS was installed within a single day with no interruptions to workflow and HBDI’s daily operations. HBDI staff were pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to work with ImageGrid PACS and how it immediately started to automate their workflow.
For the ImageGrid RIS implementation, Candelis managed the entire data migration process. The data validation and migration process was completed efficiently within a few weeks and the legacy RIS was eliminated. Candelis also worked with HBDI’s third- party billing service provider and was able to develop a cost-effective interface so that relevant information from the RIS flows to the billing module.
"I replaced my previous RIS/PACS with the Candelis solution for what I was paying for an annual maintenance contract. The transition was seamless." says Dr. Rahbar. “Candelis has been a pleasure to work with and their commitment to customer satisfaction and the willingness to listen to their customers and implement feedback means that radiologists can now get a full-featured solution at a very reasonable price”.
ImageGrid’s inherent cost advantages allow Huntington Beach Diagnostic Imaging and Breast Center to realize a significant return on their investment, giving it the ability and the flexibility to devote financial resources to invest in the latest modalities for better patient care.
“Candelis has enabled me to better compete with far larger institutions at a fraction of the cost of other vendor offerings. Today, we are a 100% paperless facility and we are able to profitably provide timely imaging services to patients and referring physicians.” says Dr. Rahbar.
