Shasta Orthopaedics was founded in 1993 with the goal of providing outstanding orthopedic and sports medicine care. Today, they represent the largest orthopedic and sports medicine practice in the northern region of California (USA) spanning over multiple sites that include spine care and physical therapy services.

Reaching limitations in facility size and patient management, Shasta Orthopaedics has recently combined all of its services into one state-of-the-art facility, centralizing all patient management and reducing the need to travel between multiple locations. Their new facility combines the orthopedic, spine care, and physical therapy services under one roof. There are 52 exam rooms, a variety of additional viewing pods, individual physician offices, and two full x-ray suites.

Since implementing digital imaging in 2007, Shasta Orthopaedics has had multiple, yet infantile, PACS solutions for image management. There was a need for a modern PACS coupled with an adequate support system to provide the best experience not only for the patients, but also for the physicians and staff.

Together with our sales partner West Coast Imaging, we have had the privilege of implementing our iQ-SYSTEM PACS solution throughout the newly built facility to deliver a state-of-the-art archiving system with unlimited user web viewing. Together, we installed our iQ-WEBX PACS, providing an unrestricted number of DICOM connections, 100 iQ-VIEW workstations, numerous templating locations, DICOMReader 5.0 for external media import, iQ-WORKLIST and a planned deep EMR integration for image association and viewing from within the EMR using our iQ-WEBX WADO solution.

In house, the medical team can now take x-rays and compare them through one of the strategically located workstations on large dual high-resolution monitors. Following that initial analysis, physicians can open the images in the exam rooms for patient consultations.

In addition, scheduling is a shared task of both Shasta Orthopaedics and the primary radiology reading group, MD Imaging. West Coast Imaging has successfully integrated the EMR systems at Shasta with the RIS at MD Imaging. As Shasta Orthopaedics will be auto-forwarding images to MD Imaging for readings, ID continuity is crucial. IMAGE’s iQ-ROUTER will cross-reference both Shasta’s EMR IDs and MD Imaging’s RIS patient IDs to ensure this continuity.

Another important portion of the integration is the ability to launch the images from within the EMR interface utilizing iQ-WEBX WADO. Whether images are taken at Shasta or MD Imaging, the images are all sent to the iQ-WEBX PACS for archiving and legal control. Once images are received at the archive, iQ-WEBX WADO receives notification of their arrival and sends image locations to the EMR. Images from both MD Imaging and Shasta Orthopaedics are centralized reducing the need to search for images across a variety of storage solutions.

Last, but not least, the state-of-the-art templating solution OrthoView®, which is integrated into iQ-VIEW PRO, enables orthopedists at Shasta Orthopaedics to quickly and easily carry out the entire templating process.

Ralph Ackermann, project manager for the Shasta Orthopaedics PACS implementation, “was thoroughly amazed at the participation of all parties involved. There was even a special installation program written by IMAGE to automate the configuration of 100 PCs rather than individual installs and configuration over a network domain. The new Shasta site was live and operational first thing on Monday morning, only four days after the old facility shutdown on the previous Thursday evening.”