Hospital for Special Surgery expedites patient care through real‑time image sharing.
Company profile
Located in Manhattan, the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) is the oldest orthopedic hospital in the nation, widely recognized for its exceptional patient care. In July 2014, the U.S. News & World Report ranked HSS as the No. 1 hospital for orthopedics for the fifth consecutive year.
Performing more surgeries annually than any other hospital in the nation, it is imperative for HSS to have a reliable method of image transmission. The biggest challenge was treating referral patients traveling to the hospital with stacks of CDs from multiple points of entry and various types of viewers.
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Richard Fleury
Executive Director of Radiology
Hospital for Special Surgery
Challenge
- Share images with better quality and more reliability
- Decrease CD usage to alleviate stress on surgeons and patients
- Expedite patient care both on-site and post-op
Solution
- Embedded CDI™ powered by Nuance®
- Cerner Acute Case Management
Results
- Improved physician education and engagement
- 100% physician query response rate
- 22% improvement in physician agreement rate
- 12% increase in CDI team review volume
Background
Cognizant of the valuable role Radiology & Imaging plays in driving efficiency and accuracy in musculoskeletal medicine, HSS was committed to finding a better solution—receiving the right diagnosis is essential to receiving the most effective medical treatment.
In late 2011, Richard Fleury, Executive Director of Radiology at HSS, and the IT team began looking for a more robust hardware solution to exchange images. Although HSS has several teleradiology sites across the United States, the hospital needed a dependable method of image sharing, and its current technology was no longer efficient. Concurrently, “Our surgeons came to us and said, ‘We are at the breakpoint for CDs and we can’t deal with them anymore,’” Fleury said. As a result, Fleury and his team quickly escalated the search for a solution.
After looking at several vendors, the team decided on the Nuance PowerShare™ Network because of its superior security and ease of implementation. “The adoption process was an enormous success,” Fleury said.