CareWell Urgent Care focused on reimagining their systems in the cloud to support their comprehensive approach to urgent care, which includes on-site labs and x-ray capabilities. Growing from four locations to over fifteen in just four years throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island, they selected Ambra to streamline image management, reduce risk, and eliminate barriers between their physicians, radiologists, and patients.
After supporting a high growth urgent care network that had grown to 65 physicians and nurse practitioners, and over 200 administrative staff, Terry Giove, Vice President of Operations, knew that managing risk was critical for success. After rolling out athenahealth’s EHR, Giove looked for an image-enabling cloud image management system, seeing that, “the redundancy of the cloud was absolutely essential for CareWell’s growth.”
Giove’s decision to move to Ambra and shift image management to the cloud quickly proved prescient. Soon after deploying Ambra, a key location was flooded, and “with Ambra we averted disaster. Without it, we’d have lost all images beyond 3 months.” Giove also found that,“adding image management to a location just takes a phone call. In a few minutes, we’re up and running. It’s really fast.” With Ambra, CareWell can grow locations, without growing complexity or risk.
“We couldn’t continue to do what we are doing without the redundancy of Ambra, there’s simply no two ways about it. It’s our primary archive.”
– Terry Giove, VP of Operations
With over 15,000 x-rays last year, and expectations to grow by another 20,000 in the near term, ensuring reads are handled timely, efficiently, and scalably was also a key focus area for Giove. By eliminating friction from image transfer and enabling remote radiologists to gain access to studies in near-real time, Ambra has enabled CareWell to partner with major hospital systems, like UMassMemorial Medical Center’s Radiology Department. “By tapping into 60+ radiologists, including specialists, we’ve improving efficiency and quality exponentially.” CareWell has also seen a dramatic acceleration in image turnaround, “We’ve cut turnaround from days to hours, so we can communicate results back to a patient and coordinate follow on treatment faster.”
“Ambra has enabled us to partner with a larger institution in a more scalable way.”
– Terry Giove, VP of Operations
Giove has also focused on streamlining every aspect of the patient journey from the registration process using tablets, accelerating the flow of information into athena, and integrating the patient’s study in Ambra. The result has cut rekeying and legacy media from the process and allowed images to be viewed from anywhere.
For example, “in athena, one of our physicians can now look at an image, while in the meantime a radiologist is doing the read,” comments Giove. And with Ambra’s FDA Class 2 support, CareWell plans to perform primary reads onsite.
But the benefits aren’t just for physicians, radiologists and staff, “for patients it’s a big plus too,” notes Giove. In fact, for patients, CareWell now offers a patient portal, “so if patients want their images they simply get an encrypted email from Ambra instantly, it’s fantastic.” Now, with Ambra, CareWell can serve every touchpoint in the patient better – delivering more efficiency, more trust, and more importantly, better patient care.
