Personalized Imaging Consultants uses PowerShare Image Sharing to help coordinate complex care journeys with ease

Background

Coordinating care for complex conditions is never easy, but some practices make it much simpler. Personalized Imaging Consultants (PIC) is a radiology management company based in Reno, Nevada, that goes above and beyond to help cancer patients navigate their unique care journeys. “We’re a small, patient-centered practice, and we care for each of our patients like a family member,” says Dr. Chivonne Harrigal at Personalized Imaging Consultants. “We treat everyone we see with empathy and compassion because we believe every patient deserves individualized care.”

To provide this level of personalized care, PIC needs immediate access to their patients’ most recent imaging and the ability to share these studies with care teams at other facilities. “The burden of image exchange should never be put on the patient, especially during this stressful period. We wanted to get away from patients having to request CDs, send them to the different facilities involved in their care, and then worry about the CDs getting lost or damaged in the mail,” says Dr. Harrigal. “Our PACS provider offered image sharing software, so I thought it would be easy to manage everything online—but boy was I wrong.”

The connection conundrum

Unfortunately for PIC, although its PACS provider offered image sharing technology, it only had a small network of connected facilities, and no easy way to set up new connections.“I had to spend my time reaching out to academic medical centers and other facilities to try to get connections set up—time I could have spent with our patients,” says Dr. Harrigal. “It was really frustrating to have invested in this image sharing technology but have no usable network to share images with.” After talking to colleagues at other facilities, Dr. Harrigal soon realized that most of the centers she was trying to connect to were using PowerShare—an image sharing solution connecting more than 14,000 facilities across its network.

The power of an expansive network and a close partnership

When PIC replaced its existing image sharing vendor with PowerShare, it saw the difference immediately.

“I’d had zero success trying to connect through our previous vendor, but PowerShare had thousands of connections already built in, and we went from one connection to ten connections almost instantaneously,” says Dr. Harrigal.

“It’s incredibly easy to use PowerShare,” she adds. “Every time we have a patient with priors from elsewhere, or we need to push images to a different facility, we just add them to our contacts list and get connected.”

Within a month of moving to PowerShare, PIC established 26 connections; and a few months later, it has 50 connections and counting. Dr. Harrigal attributes this rapid expansion to the outreach efforts of PIC’s dedicated  customer success team.

Improving every care journey

With a vast network and reliable connections, PowerShare is now a critical tool for PIC to help its patients coordinate their care across multidisciplinary teams based in multiple facilities. Everyone involved in each patient’s care has easy access to the latest imaging and comparisons, so they can provide more precise and timely treatment. PIC is also deploying  PowerScribe One to improve their radiology workflow and report quality with the latest automation and decision support, driven by AI-powered language understanding, built-in clinical guidance, and industry leading, cloud-hosted speech technology. With increased reporting speed and accuracy, “PowerScribe One is going to transform the way we work, allowing us to do more for our patients and our practice,” says Dr. Harrigal.

“And with integrated report sharing through PowerShare, we’ll have a more comprehensive view of our patients, equipping us to make timely, informed decisions with care teams.” Alongside the many time saving and efficiency gains PIC has realized with PowerShare, perhaps the greatest impact has been the peace of mind it’s given to its patients. “It blows their minds that we’re connected to all these centers, and that they no longer have to worry about tracking the physical receipt and delivery of their imaging studies,” says Dr. Harrigal. “PowerShare has been revolutionary for us—it’s the backbone of our practice, and it enables us to provide the highest quality care for every patient.”