Image Transfer Across Mountains
Sharing imaging when your facility is surrounded by mountains is no easy feat. From winter skiers to summer hikers, and elk hunters, the population seen by the facility would often head home at the end of their respective seasons. It wouldn’t be long before a call would come in from a patient or physician wanting to see imaging that was taken at Gunnison. Imaging was mailed and shipped on CDs, a process that could take up to two hours of administrator time per day, wasted thousands of dollars per month, and ultimately, delayed patient care and satisfaction.
Today, using Ambra Health, patients sign a consent form at the facility after an exam, and imaging is then emailed to them or their physician directly through a secure access link. One patient even found themselves in Germany, and within seconds, their imaging was shared with the German physician!
Ambra Health also acts as a secure second layer of storage and disaster recovery for Gunnison providing the flexibility needed for instant access, flexibility, and scalability.
“Patients told me, ‘I want something that isn’t 20 steps’. With Ambra, it’s one step for them to have imaging access.”
– BRETT BRUCE, JD, MSRS Director of Imaging, Cardiopulmonary, Respiratory, Therapy & Polysomnography Services, Gunnison Valley Health
Referring Physicians
Imaging is the currency for growing referrals. Gunnison found that other vendors were only willing to help them share with certain institutions or within certain regions. They needed the flexibility to send and create automated workflows with high volume referring physicians and centers of their choosing. One local urologist had refused to work with Gunnison any longer due to a lack of imaging access. Today, Ambra Health established an automatic workflow that routes imaging taken at Gunnison directly to the physician. Since then, the relationship has been reestablished and several other automated routing workflows have been created.
Ditch the Disk
With a large millennial population, the Gunnison marketing team was inspired to share Ambra’s #DitchTheDisk resources. A patient’s impression of a facility begins the moment they step through the doors. When time is wasted struggling to upload images off a CD or worse yet, letting them know their images are inaccessible for any reason, a sense of frustration emerges that may leave a permanent bad impression despite the otherwise strong offerings of the facility. Millennials are a particularly online-savvy generation with enhanced expectations regarding the accessibility of their healthcare data. #DitchTheDisk encourages facilities to move away from CDs and open the doors to rapid image-sharing.