MRI Zürich

The service left much to be desired, a system with frequent failures and that was not built for a growing imaging center due to its structure: This was the motivation of the doctors at the MRI to change this situation when they thought about installing a new radiology information system (RIS). The selection criteria for the new system were easily defined: good availability of the software at all imaging center sites and high stability for the central installation. “medavis was convincing with this criterion and we can still say this in 2016,” Dr. med. Torsten Straube, radiologist and neuro-radiologist (FMH Swiss Medical Association) confirms the decision. His colleague and head of IT, Simon Preisig, adds: “With an availability of 99% our wish back then was fulfilled.”

Standardised Workflows optimise Patient Care and economic Efficiency

In addition to the technical requirements for the new system, the physicians also had their wishes: “If you want to work economically efficiently and want to bear the growth of your imaging center in mind, the standardised workflows play a significant role for success,” Dr. Straube explains. “Even if not all physicians are always happy with it, we agreed upon using uniform worklists. These worklists are available at all sites and for all users at each workstation due to the central installation. This enables colleagues to easily stand in for each other. If a doctor wants to get a second opinion, he simply sends the patient details with a respective order to the worklist of a colleague. If a colleague is not available, we quickly know what needs to be done and can distribute the reporting orders from their list.” Due to this, not only the waiting time from examination to diagnosis shortens for a patient, but also the report quality could be improved due to second opinions. With this, the patient care is not only quicker, but also more secure. With medavis RIS, not only the exchange between doctors became better, but also the billing process was simplified. The Swiss billing catalogue TARMED is stored in RIS. The fee codes are documented by the radiographer by entering the rendered services and are sent electronically to the health insurance. “The doctor processed the examinations for his patient by opening them via the RIS worklist and PACS. He can see everything at one glance and thus also controls the fee codes.” As the physician sees at once which examination has been carried out and which billing code was entered, he has the chance to instantly correct errors while the patient is still at the imaging center. “He only needs two or three clicks and is finished,” Dr. Straube says. Of course there is always new potential for workflow optimisation. “That’s why we had a check up at the beginning of this year carried out by medavis at one of our imaging centers, where a medavis employee had a look a our workflows. medavis made suggestions how we can improve these with the existing software and with new modules.” Already during appointment scheduling at the registration a perfect collaboration of software and (trained) employees can contribute to smooth workflows and optimal use of available resources. This does not only increase the economic efficiency, but at the same time patient care; on the one hand by shortening waiting times and on the other hand by optimised reporting regarding quality.

Reliability signifies satisfied Users

“The satisfaction with RIS is high, as you can rely on the system. Everyone has access to everything and can work from anywhere. This is very positive for the users,” Dr. Straube sums up. And this is also confirmed from the IT side: “We have few failures and the support is very good and friendly. You realise that specialists receive the tickets and we appreciate this very much,” Mr. Preisig adds. “Although the number of our users has been continuously increasing for many years, the effort for administering the system remains the same – even though more users make more mistakes.”