FILMLESS with ROCOVIEW

There are many advantages to going filmless with ROCOVIEW.

Financial advantages of going filmless.

1. Reduce operating costs related to printing film.  After inputting your department?s workload on this page, you will rediscover the enormous amount of money you spend (waste) on film each month.  As an example of the cost savings of going digital, we compare archiving CT on film vs. CD?s.  Each cross sectional image is 512 pixels X 512 pixels X 2 Bytes grayscale = .524 MB.  When printing 12 images per film sheet for a typical CT study of 100 images, this amounts to 9 sheets of film (~50MB/CT study).  At $1.25/sheet of film this totals $11.25/study.  A single CD holding this same digital information costs about the same as one sheet of film so for this example printing film costs about 10 times as much as archiving on CD?s!  Also, since CD?s hold 650-800MB, each CD can hold about 15 CT studies, which means archiving digitally can give you 150 times the storage for your archiving dollar!
2. Reduce costs spent on personnel required to run the fileroom.  As you go digital, you will find yourself needing fewer people to manually track down films since a doubleclick of the mouse almost immediately retrieves the study (and all comparison studies!) versus 15 minutes of the radiologist or clinician waiting to find that the study is in the warehouse (?come back in 2 hours??).
3. Reduce currier and copy costs.  Instantly send unlimited, perfect duplicates of studies to remote locations free of charge versus the excessive cost of making copies that are of lesser quality plus the time delay and unreliability of transporting studies and then having to do the whole process over again when someone else needs the study.
4. Retain the business of your referring doctors.  Why should a clinician continue to use ?analog? radiology services when there are plenty of other departments out there that are ?getting with the program? and going digital?  Clinicians don?t like to ?fight the fileroom?, wait for films, get studies with films out of order, have to dig through enormous ?cube-shaped folders? to find a single image, receive folders that they have to file and then return, or don?t get studies at all since another clinician has them checked out, lost, or ?stolen.?  Clinicians now know that a DIGITAL RADIOLOGY DEPARTMENT gives them ALL their patients? studies on the computer monitor with a doubleclick of the mouse.  Clinicians will intentionally ?loose the analog radiology departments to follow up? since the service is poor compared to digital departments.  Anything that wastes the clinicians? time will cause him seek services elsewhere.  It is very hard to retrieve a disgruntled referring clinician.
5. Significantly improve efficiency. So much of the technologists? time is spent handling, labeling, transporting, and sorting film.  Since the technologist is the ?face? of the radiology department, it is important to have the best personnel you can get.  The work environment is dramatically improved for this employee when you go from film to digital and therefore higher quality (harder working) radiology technologists will generally seek digital radiology department over an analog department.  They would rather spend their workday as a technologist than a fileroom worker.  This can be a major selling point when hiring technologists.

Medical advantages of going filmless.

1. Significantly improve efficiency.  The ?analog? radiologist spends between 30% - 70% of his/her time handling film (non-revenue generating activity) rather than doing what he/she was trained to do ? interpret images (revenue generating activity).  It?s elementary business math.  Let an inexpensive, fast computer do the non-revenue generating activity at a speed much faster and much cheaper than a radiologist.  Not only have you eliminated the time wasting but now the RADIOLOGIST IS MORE AVAILABLE to read more studies (more revenue generation), work with clinicians, and interface with patients.  This is good radiology.  You have effectively reduced your perceived radiologist shortage by freeing him/her from excessive secretarial duties.
2. Improve interpretations. When a radiologist is spending 30% - 70% of  his/her concentration handling film, this significantly reduces his/her ability to focus on the study.  Tragically, creation of an accurate interpretation of a study frequently seems to take a back seat to short term financial issues (?we can?t go digital ? we got no money). The reading environment of the radiologist must be optimized to serve the patient properly (the most important reason!).  Also, poor interpretation leads to injury of patients, longer expensive stays, understandably angry clinicians, loss of referrals, and lawsuits.  A small investment up front for a DIGITAL RADIOLOGY DEPARTMENT will save much more than its cost in lives, money, time, and headaches down the road.

Greg Rose, MD, PhD