Konica Minolta’s Exa Platform Helps Green Bay Radiology Grow While Streamlining Operations

WAYNE, N.J., March 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Konica Minolta Healthcare Americas, Inc. announces that Green Bay Radiology installed Konica Minolta’s Exa™ PACS at several of its partner facilities in northeastern Wisconsin. The practice serves 11 hospitals and clinics with 18 radiologists who specialize in interpreting CT, MRI, X-ray, mammography, nuclear medicine, ultrasound and a wide variety of interventional radiological procedures.

Green Bay Radiology uses shared general and subspecialty worklists to provide timely, subspecialized care to their patients in Northeast Wisconsin. For their largest contracted health partner, this is straightforward as all facilities share an electronic medical record (EMR) and PACS. However, the practice's independent primary care, oncology and orthopedic clinic contracted health partners posed a challenge to this model. Konica Minolta's Exa Platform has been a key part of the solution. 

"Exa PACS Zero Footprint Universal Viewer has enabled us to create a platform where we are able to provide the same service model to our smaller partners," says Timothy Enright, MD, a musculoskeletal radiologist partner at Green Bay Radiology. "We are able to consolidate all these additional independent studies from different sites onto a common worklist, in order to provide the customers with similar access to greater efficiency and subspecialty radiology care. This has led to faster, subspecialized service for our physician partners and patients." 

For example, at two small clinic sites that used transcription services, final report turnaround-time decreased from two to three days to under one workday. This greater efficiency and utilization of the web-based Exa PACS has also provided Green Bay Radiology with exceptional flexibility to streamline staff scheduling in a more efficient and productive manner.

“By creating a central worklist, we can staff, as needed, for interventional procedures and on-site consultation, but we don’t need to over-staff because the reading volume is shared across the other sites,” Dr. Enright said. “We have the flexibility to put radiologists where they’re [most] needed, which allows us to be efficient.”

Exa delivers a diagnostic-quality Zero Footprint Universal Viewer for DICOM and non-DICOM images including nuclear medicine; Server-Side Rendering for fast access to large files, such as CT or MRI, with no prefetching required; and cybersecurity with no data transferred to or stored on workstations to minimize unwanted exposure to patient data. For women’s health departments and clinics seeking to consolidate viewing, it offers universal viewing of images from a single workstation.

Dr. Enright says implementation at multiple sites was challenging, but Konica Minolta Healthcare helped them navigate every step. “We relied heavily on Konica Minolta’s services, and we were able to deliver with uninterrupted service. Our clients are happy with our work, so it’s been very good for our group,” he said.