Arizona-based Banner Imaging is fundamentally changing their radiology processes – and patient care – by tackling some of radiologists’ toughest challenges head-on, harnessing technologies and resources necessary to moving healthcare forward. In partnership with Nuance, they’re overcoming a range of challenges from workflow inefficiencies and inconsistent data to errors in diagnostic reports and barriers to collaborative communication.
With locations across Arizona, Banner Imaging (Banner) creates more than 600,000 medical imaging studies a year – and with volumes that high, they’ve faced their fair share of radiology workflow challenges along the way. At Banner, it’s not just about standardizing data from numerous diagnostic modalities or normalizing measurement data for precise diagnoses. It’s also about establishing meaningful communications with referring physicians and helping to make sure patients don’t fall through the cracks.
Banner is solving many of these challenges by taking proactive steps to integrate and operationalize a range of solutions, technologies, and resources that help alleviate radiologists’ data-centric burdens and workflow inefficiencies. They’re also finding new ways to improve patient care, create competitive advantages for the organization, and move healthcare forward.
Communicating effectively with referring physicians
Banner Imaging recognizes that timely and responsive communication – between radiologists and referring physicians – is essential to appropriate patient care. That level of communication means having access to timely and accurate diagnostic reports. By implementing an integrated suite of reporting and communication solutions, radiologists at Banner can now take advantage of technology that streamlines and automates many reporting workflows and processes. This includes auto-populating reports with normalized measurement data delivered from various modalities and accurately communicating key findings to the providers responsible for the patient’s care.
Banner’s drive for best practice excellence is supported by solutions offered through a long-standing collaboration between Nuance and Hyland Healthcare that provides advanced data integration capabilities between PowerScribe and Hyland’s ModLink solution. This integration eliminates the need for radiologists to manually re-enter data into reports that is already being captured by the imaging modality. This helps create diagnostic reports more accurately and efficiently, leading to more accurate communication between radiologists and referring physicians—and therefore, better patient outcomes. Banner has recognized the value of these integration technologies and added ModLink to its PowerScribe platform earlier this year. Comments Banner radiologist Brian J. Frohna, MD, “The ModLink integration with PowerScribe is absolutely one of the best technology investments we have ever made.”
Closing the loop on actionable findings at Banner Imaging
Additionally, Banner radiologists are proactively addressing failed follow-ups by helping to ensure actionable findings are communicated to ordering providers. Through their new workflow, which incorporates PowerConnect Actionable Findings, Banner Imaging now has an automated solution for notifying ordering clinicians about their patients’ critical results. Before this solution was in place, Banner Imaging would have to call a referring provider’s office to try to get the physician on the phone to communicate those findings. Now, these communication protocols are automated through Actionable Findings, closing the loop on those communications in ways that help prevent patients from falling through the cracks.
The mission at Banner Health is to make healthcare better so life can be easier – and the collaboration with Nuance means their radiologists are free to focus on their true purpose and goal of providing excellent patient care.
