About Medical Imaging Partnership
Founded in 2010 by a group of clinicians and experienced diagnostics management professionals Medical Imaging Partnership (MIP) delivers medical imaging, including a range of clinical, business and information technology services to patients and referrers, as well as partner healthcare providers in England. MIP offers radiology reporting for both the NHS and independent sector, serving a population of nearly 2.5 million people in London, and across Sussex, Kent, and northwest England.
“IntelePACS™ is an integral part of our business. It’s fulfilled our business and clinical requirements, and being able to roll it out incrementally exceeded expectations”
A Rapidly-Growing Organisation
Having initially provided services to five local hospitals and NHS facilities in Sussex, today MIP’s 80 radiologists read approximately 120,000 studies per year (across all modalities) for 17 clients, including several NHS Trusts and private medical providers across the country. In addition to its numerous urgent care and DEXA contracts, MIP also handles imaging for one of the two major MSK contracts in Sussex.
A highly-distributed organisation, MIP delivers imaging services from 17 sites across the country, including their own reading facilities and on-site at hospitals. In addition, the organisation has up to 20 radiologists at a time reporting from home. The organisation also operates their own scanning services, which includes multiple MRI and MSK centres, and a fleet of five mobile MRI scanners that rotate between seven hospitals.
The Need for a Stable and Robust, yet Flexible System
At the heart of MIP’s rapid growth is a technologically savvy team, who early on realised the impact that IT infrastructure would have on their organisation. While searching for a highly-flexible solution that would easily scale to match their growth, MIP’s founder, Dr. Ian Francis, was advised by a peer to look at IntelePACS™.
In addition to its resiliency, IntelePACS leverages a web-based architecture, which makes it easy to set up for home or remote reporting, thus allowing MIP to engage with highly-skilled subspecialists across the country. The system also allows them to provide services across the UK using a single, centralised PACS archive. For their mobile scanners, images taken throughout the day are sent to IntelePACS and added to the appropriate radiologist’s worklist.
“What was appealing about IntelePACS was the system’s stability and robustness,” said Dr. Francis. “It is also highly flexible, which allows us to deliver end-to-end imaging services using an unorthodox care model – dispersed acquisition sources and radiologists spread out across multiple geographies.”
A Highly-Efficient Workflow
Using Intelerad’s InteleViewer™, MIP’s radiologists are able to leverage a highly-efficient diagnostic platform with integrated speech recognition. A feature-rich solution, InteleViewer provides radiologists with rapid access to patients’ prior images and reports, ensuring a strong understanding of the patient’s history when evaluating a study. Altogether, the solution enables MIP to quickly turn around high-quality study interpretations.
“Our radiologists, who will work from various workstations over the course of a week, all say that InteleViewer is their preferred viewer,” said Jo Gilligan, PACS Manager, MIP. “We’ve also had clinicians ask the other organizations they work for to have their entire workloads sent to IntelePACS.”
InteleViewer’s intuitive interface has also been beneficial, allowing widely dispersed staff to quickly familiarise themselves with the solution. As Dr. Nick Spencer, MIP’s Medical Director pointed out, InteleViewer also provides the same user experience they would have on-site at a hospital or reading facility, providing “the same level of performance, regardless of where we’re located.”
Getting Patient Results Back to Referring Physicians Quickly
To ensure patient care is delivered in a timely fashion, final reports are immediately sent to referring physicians using InteleConnect. A zero-footprint clinical portal and viewer, InteleConnect provides referring physicians with easy access to patient orders, images and reports at any time, from any location. Platform-agnostic, the solution allows referring physicians to keep up-to-date with real-time order statuses via desktop or mobile web browsers.
According to Dr. Francis, InteleConnect™ has also been very positive for referrers by enabling them to share images and collaborate with peers. MIP’s referrers have also used the solution to conduct multi-disciplinary team meetings so specific cases can be discussed by care teams.
“For MIP, InteleConnect is a competitive differentiator,” said Ms. Gilligan. “Our clients have been impressed by it. It gets images and reports to the doctor quickly and ensures that patients aren’t showing up for follow-up appointments when the right information is not available.”
The Value of Industry-Leading Support
In addition to Intelerad’s medical imaging platform, MIP is also very positive when discussing the technical support that Intelerad provides.
“The support has been brilliant,” said Ms. Gilligan. “They’re like old friends. You can phone up, log a ticket and the team will get to the bottom of it. Or, if there’s a bug, the right people will know know about it and take care of it.”
Seamless Integration with Third-Party Solutions
IntelePACS’ system flexibility and modular build has been of particular benefit to MIP since its inception, which has allowed them to roll out key solutions over time. This includes Intelerad’s Multi-Method Reporting™, which blends dictation, speech recognition and structured reports together into a single, streamlined interface and workflow; as well as Intelerad’s Peer Review™ and Analytics™ modules.
Intelerad’s ability to seamlessly integrate third-party solutions into IntelePACS has also been highly beneficial to MIP, which use M*Modal for speech recognition and Soliton for their RIS.
“IntelePACS is an integral part of our business,” said Dr. Francis. “It’s fulfilled our business and clinical requirements, and being able to roll it out incrementally exceeded expectations.”