About Ballarat Health Services
Located 90 minutes northwest of Melbourne, Australia’s Ballarat Health Services has provided high-quality healthcare to the Ballarat and Grampians region for over 160 years. Serving a population of 230,000 people spread across 48,000 square kilometres, Ballarat provides a comprehensive range of general and specialist care across every key medical and healthcare discipline.
At the heart of the organization is Ballarat Base Hospital, a 650-bed teaching hospital that’s affiliated with Deakin Medical School. The largest facility of its kind in the region, the hospital includes an acute hospital, emergency, diagnostic and psychiatric services.
“Everyone here is happy with the way Intelerad solutions work, to the point that all our radiologists have put InteleViewer in all their private practices as well,” said Nguyen. “So it was clear they were fans of the solutions and from an IT perspective it’s highly reliable.”
Enhancing the Capabilities of their Legacy PACS
Nearly 50% of Ballarat’s imaging services are provided to outpatients who are privately referred by general practitioners and specialists. To maintain that side of their business, it’s important for them to be able to rapidly distribute results to referrers. While the first PACS they deployed in the late 90s offered a host of benefits, the system’s lack of development over time began to impact how outpatient studies were distributed. With their system provider unable to support their needs, they began searching for an alternative.
“Our success is based on keeping our patients and referring physicians happy,” said Huy Nguyen, Ballarat Health Services. “With 50% of our study volume – about 60,000 studies per year – dedicated to outpatients, something needed to be done.”
Seeking a solution, Ballarat’s team discovered InteleWeb™, an interoperability solution from Intelerad that allows imaging centers and hospitals to offer a remote viewing environment for medical images and reports to their referral base. Not only would this ensure that referring physicians would receive patient images in a timely fashion, but it also meant they would get the features and benefits they need without having to do a complete PACS replacement.
A State-of-the-Art Viewer Enables Better Turnaround Times
Once deployed, InteleWeb was able to provide seamless remote access to images and reports. This was beneficial for Ballarat’s staff members working on call, and also for building relationships with referrers, as they could transmit images digitally instead of printing films or burning images to CDs.
Over time, Ballarat began expanding the use of InteleWeb, to the point where InteleWeb was being used as a front-end solution that connected to the hospital’s legacy PACS. This allowed radiologists to read studies using InteleViewer™, an intuitive, state-of-the-art viewing solution that their radiologists were familiar with given its widespread use in clinics across Australia.
“We receive a lot of positive feedback from our radiologists in regards to InteleViewer,” said Nguyen. “It’s intuitive and user-friendly, which allows radiologists to achieve faster turnaround times and get more done in a day.”
In addition, InteleWeb was also set up for use as a backup system in the event that their legacy PACS went down.
Deploying a New System When the Timing is Right
Once ready to replace their legacy system, Ballarat deployed IntelePACS®, which allowed them to maintain the superior diagnostic workflow that they had become accustomed to over the years.
“Everyone here is happy with the way Intelerad solutions work, to the point that all our radiologists have put InteleViewer in all their private practices as well,” said Nguyen. “So it was clear they were fans of the solutions and from an IT perspective it’s highly reliable.”
A highly scalable solution, IntelePACS will also be beneficial to Ballarat given the town’s rapid growth and the hospital’s increase in outpatients. In addition, Ballarat selected IntelePACS for its stability and redundancy, which allows them to have a backup system running at a separate site, which they can easily switch to should the need arise. According to Nguyen, they are also quite pleased with the support offered by Intelerad.
“Intelerad’s team is very knowledgeable and very responsive,” said Nguyen. “Support is really good, so we really don’t have any problems.”