A Visit to the Orthopaedic Clinic
1:30 pm: Children Arrive for Orthopaedic Clinic
It's 1:30 pm, and Eric Wall, MD, is seeing patients in the Orthopaedic Clinic at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. He enters an exam room and turns to a computer to see the X-ray of his patient's leg. After the exam, he prints out the image for the child to take home as a keepsake.
"They love getting their X-ray," he says.
Virtually every child seen in the Orthopaedic Clinic has at least one X-ray and often several during the course of treatment. Before electronic imaging, keeping track of all those films was, frankly, difficult. Ask the nurses.
Michelle Rodgers, RN, says that for most of her 15 years as a nurse in the Orthopaedic Clinic, one of her responsibilities was to find each patient's films and post them in the exam room before calling the child and the doctor to the room. She spent a lot of time hunting.
Films were handled a lot and were easy to misplace, she says. The film might be filed in the wrong jacket. Or it might be at one of the Cincinnati Children's satellite locations, where the child was seen at the previous appointment. Or the doctor might have taken it to his office and not returned it yet. "There were a lot of lost films," Rodgers acknowledges, and patients waited while the nurses hunted.
PACS — a computer-based Picture Archiving and Communication System — changed all this. With PACS, the medical center has become virtually filmless. Now radiology exams — about 150,000 a year — are stored, retrieved and viewed digitally.
Physicians can see radiology studies on special PACS monitors in many hospital locations, on wireless computers they take into patient rooms or on desktop computers in their offices. And with a high speed connection, they can see their patients' images and the radiologist's report on their home computers.
What has PACS meant for patients and staff in the Orthopaedic Clinic? Now, moments after images are processed in the Radiology Department, a paper copy automatically prints out in clinic, alerting nurses that the image is ready. The patient's nurse can pull up the image on the PACS monitor in the exam room and call the patient and physician to the room.
For doctors, nurses and patients alike, clinic flows more smoothly.
