In an emergency room setting, everyone on staff needs to be able to communicate information about the patient and his or her status quickly and accurately. It is for this reason that workstations set up throughout the urgent care medical facility should all be outfitted with urgent care PACS. With a digital suite of radiology equipment, including urgent care CR, urgent care DR and other urgent care digital x-ray peripherals, your emergency unit will be fully functional and up to the speeds needed to provide excellent patient care during extreme care situations.
Urgent care digital x-ray systems will likely be some of the first equipment used with a patient that comes through an urgent care unit. CR and DR image capture systems take the time out of creating medical images, and this speed can help to save lives in the emergency room.
Once the medical digital image has been created in the DICOM medical image format, it can be sent to a workstation running urgent care PACS. With a PACS system in place, the emergency room workstation becomes a communication center so that everyone involved with the patient's care will have immediate access to the vital patient information as it is gathered by the emergency team. Digital images can be viewed on the workstation, and digital enhancements can be made on the screen in order to get a clearer image with the result of better patient care.
Digital medical images can then be sent and received over a local area network, wide area network or on a virtual private network online. This allows the urgent care team to transmit the patient data electronically, within seconds, to other physicians who will be providing additional medical care to the patient. The speed with which this can happen also helps to greatly improve patient care.
DICOM images can also be stored on the PACS system. This means that after the patient is sent out of urgent care to a hospital recovery area, the digitized patient records, including the digital medical images, can be accessed by authorized medical personnel from the archive, leading to better patient care because all records for the patient are accessible from this one point of contact. It also helps the medical facility to stay within compliance of HIPPA regulations concerning patient privacy, and the medical facility will have appropriate disaster recovery digital data in place should an emergency strike.
By taking advantage of all the time-saving options that come from a digital radiology system, urgent care facilities can provide better patient care.
Jonathan Blocker writes about--urgent care CR and urgent care digital x-ray