November is the time of the year when mustaches become meaningful signs of support for a great cause. Indeed as I’m writing this note, we are well into Movember, the month where considerable efforts are spent increasing awareness about men’s health, and more specifically about prostate and testicular cancer, as well as mental health. It’s great to see many mustachioed colleagues devote time and effort to such a strong cause. There are so many important causes needing our involvement, so many opportunities to make a difference.
Our own mission is “Making a difference in healthcare”, and this is the philosophy that underpins everything we do, from research and development to client relations. With the move from film based radiology to digital over the last 20 years, we have become the backbone for our customers’ growth, playing a role in transforming the industry in the process. As a result, making a difference is deeply embedded in our vibrant internal culture. But I would say that our commitment to making a difference goes even deeper than this because our solutions, at the end of the day, help people get better and stay healthy. Medical imaging provides the information radiologists and physicians need to detect, treat and manage diseases. As the Ontario Association of Radiologists rightly states, “Early diagnostic saves lives. Without diagnosis there can be no treatment, there can be no cure.”
As we go through our day to day, it may be easy to forget the true impact of our solutions on patient care delivery. Our clients work every single day with our tools, which is why we are always looking to improve and innovate on the technology and services we offer. Our world class viewer and flagship product, InteleViewer™, allows radiologists to read more productively so they can provide accurate and timely results to physicians and their patients. Our Clario SmartWorklist™ allows radiologists to organize their work so they can spend more time reading patient studies and less time on non-diagnostic tasks. Radiologist using InteleViewer deliver results and support to their clinicians who access our system through the InteleConnect® EV portal. This fosters vital virtual collaboration by providing referring physicians real-time access to the radiologist while reviewing patient’s images and reports from anywhere, so they can deliver care when it is needed. Our nuage® Patient Portal will allow patients to be more engaged in managing their illness or their chronic disease. At the end of the day, our solutions do make a difference in healthcare. So too, do our employees.
And in more ways than one. At Intelerad, we are dedicated to make a difference well beyond our everyday work. Our people are involved in supporting various causes in the communities in which they live and work. As a company, we wanted to facilitate, generate and expand our employees’ community involvement. To do so, we recently launched our “Make a Difference” day, a volunteering program whereby every Intelerad team member will be able to offer his or her time in support of local organizations.
The overall objective of this new initiative for Intelerad is, ultimately, to democratize access to medical imaging. As such, we identified five key pillars of action where we believe we can make a real impact.
Our five pillars of action are:
- Maternal and child health
- Remote and indigenous communities
- Mental health and mental illness
- Newcomers and refugees
- Elderly people
Why these five pillars? Because for each of these groups or causes, there can often be limited access to appropriate medical imaging services, which in turn can cause significant health problems because illnesses are not detected on time and not properly treated and monitored.
In addition to community involvement, we also put in place a community giving program for our employees, with the help of HealthPartners. Thanks to the generosity of our people, we hope to make an impact in this way as well. As you can see, our community implication is fully aligned with our mission to make a difference in healthcare. I’m looking forward to sharing more on our involvement later, once the program is in full swing.
We are now making the final preparations for our most important event of the year, RSNA 2019. We’ll be making a difference there as well, thanks to our constant focus on making our solutions even better, with all the planned features that we are going to demo to our existing and prospective customers. I’m very proud of our team members, who are accomplishing amazing things, and I want to thank them for the outstanding results we’ve had up until now. Stay tuned for my next blog post on RSNA, where I’ll be able to share the results of months and months of preparation and collective efforts.
Until next time,
Paul.