#06 - Imaging Expediter Tile

Andy: Hi, this is Andy from the Command Center team.

Today, we're here to talk to you about the Imaging Expediter Tile.

This Tile helps with at-a-glance, real-time visibility to available capacity by modality and supports operational prioritization. You see we've landed on Tile Viewer, where you always land from our system. We'll click on the Imaging Expediter Tile or app to dive in. Before we dive into the individual patients that are showing on the Tile, let's look across the top of the Tile.

You see, of course, the name of the Tile on the left, and then on the right you see the QuickNav button where you can navigate between facilities if you're a multi facility institution. The ‘i’ or info button, let's click on that.

This is where our legend lives, where you can always see what every symbol or flag on the Tile means. You see at the top there the different modalities that are in scope, you see some of the attributes that are used by the hospital in the prioritization of the structured lists below, and then alerts or flags, things that are special about those individual patients that are also important to have visibility to.

To the right of the info button or a legend, you'll see the settings button. It looks like a little gear, and we'll click on that. And in the settings button, you have the opportunity as a user to adjust the Tile to how you like to look at it. And so of course, you can control the scrolling behavior, you can pick which hospital you always want to land on, and then you can pick the modality of interest to you.

So for the purposes of this, I'm going to pick MRI and unselect all the others except readiness. And then within readiness, I'm going to apply a filter to just look at MRI patients. So I'm going to filter that down as well, and then I'll hit apply. You can also hit save settings, but I'm going to hit apply. Save settings means come back here next time I land here, but for the purpose of the demo, I'm just going to jump there. So now what you've seen is it’s brought up on the top of the Tile, a prioritized work list of jobs in the queue, and in the bottom, readiness factors.

Before I show you those, let's look at some of the numbers across the top. Over on the right, on the right hand side, you see where it says ‘inpatient four and five’, you can click on that, and see that we have four patients that are inpatient that are already scheduled, and five that are ordered and not yet scheduled. Obviously, those ones that are ordered and scheduled are grayed out in the work queue below. The ones that are not, are not. No observation patients today. No ED patients right now. And two outpatients that are not yet registered. So they're on the queue, but they haven't checked in yet. So, keep an eye out for them when they arrive.

Below that, you see a string of numbers with days of the week going across. This tells us the available hours out of how many hours total of that modality's capacity are there. So, on Monday there are 18 hours. We'll click on that. You can always hover on things in our Tiles to see details. We'll see that there are 18 hours available.

Basically, the imaging center is booked solid, and the other two modality are wide open right now. So below that, the most important part of the Tile is the structured work list where each of the jobs is listed in priority, and the priority is under complete control of the customer, and which factors they want to outweigh which other factors, and it's continuously reprioritizing based on those factors. So if we click on one of these, we can see a detail. For example, on that top one, you can see that this patient is both an ICU patient and a staff patient. Of course, by the way this is mock data, not real data, but representative of what we see. Below that, the stat one has the little double bar on the left. That means this is a multi-modality patient.

So this patient also needs a different scan in addition to the MRI. So when you bring them down, we want to make sure that we bring them down once and do both, and do them in the right order, so we don't preclude another study based upon the order of operations that we need to follow if there's a contrast involved. So that's the top bit, which is the basically a prioritized work list. And then on the bottom, we see readiness factors.

Let's click on the top one for example, and you see that this patient has everything in terms of making them a high priority patient, but they're missing a screening form. Or the one maybe a couple down from that will have a different factor that is prioritizing readiness. For example, this patient has a stat order for an exam, but that exam was with contrast and they had abnormal creatinine, which means it’s a high risk situation.

Now the hospital screening form you know, will help identify these situations at the time of imaging, but the Tile helps to provide visibility to the medical imaging expediter beforehand, easier in the process, allowing them to change their order of operations or adjust their workflow to prevent delays in care. So that's how this works.

Let me go back and put the modalities back up, and I'm going to add the delayed reads to the Tile. What the reads does is it gives us a list basically of Okay, so now these are patients that have been scanned, but there's a priority of reads, and you can see which reads are already assigned and in play with a radiologist to be read, and which ones are not based upon what's grayed out. But you can click through these and see some examples of reads that are waiting. That top one maybe... We have an example here of where you have... the ultrasound’s been done, but the QA hasn't been done by the tech, so that the radiologist can't read it yet.

So again, you can see in real time those things that are getting in the way. And if this list gets really long, you can... if you're the expediter in the Command Center, you can decide, "Hey, I need to call in another radiologist, or get somebody to remotely read some of these to work the list down so we stay on plan." So that's the Imaging Expediter Tile. It helps minimize delays in care and optimize throughput to the scanners. Thanks again for your time.

Ellen: If you as a physician at Humber, “What is the most valuable thing that the Command Center has done for you?” Many will respond with: “Help me get the inpatient imaging done faster without having to chase people around.” As the Imaging Expediter, the Tile helps me stay on top of all the imaging requests, and allows me to see how we’re doing against our service level agreement. It alerts me to multiple modality orders so that patients come down once for multiple studies.

And special situations like lab results that have abnormal creatinine, for those patients that have scans with contrast orders. Of course, we would normally catch that last one when we do the pre-scan checklist.

However, knowing about the problem earlier gives me a chance to alert the staff and avoid scrambling when the patient goes down for their scan.