The challenge
Northgate's pathology side ran on lab software; its imaging side ran on Word documents saved to a shared folder, named by patient and date. A radiologist reporting a scan opened last week's document for a similar study, edited it, and saved a copy.
That process worked as long as nothing went wrong, and went wrong in exactly the way you would expect: a report occasionally went out with a sentence left over from the previous patient.
Because the two systems did not talk, a patient having both blood work and an ultrasound was billed twice, appeared as two records, and received two reports with no relationship to each other.
What we did
Both departments moved onto one system with a single patient record, so blood work and imaging for the same visit share a registration and a bill.
The imaging side moved from free-form Word documents to structured templates that open as a complete normal study. Radiologists edit down to what they observed rather than editing up from someone else's previous report — which is what had been causing the leftover-sentence problem.
Existing Word templates were converted during onboarding, so the radiologists started from language they already used rather than something unfamiliar.
The outcome
Routine ultrasound turnaround roughly halved, because a normal study is now largely a matter of confirming and signing.
The leftover-text problem disappeared entirely, since each report starts from a clean template rather than a copy of a previous patient's document.
Combined billing removed the double-registration issue, and referring doctors now receive one report covering the visit rather than two arriving separately.
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