How McFarland Clinic reduced downtime from months to minutes with a suite of medical imaging solutions

Chris Gunderson, PACS administrator for McFarland Clinic Health Ventures, shares the same fear as every healthcare IT leader: downtime. The threat of system downtime hangs over the IT staff of every hospital, clinic, and health system – if something goes down, that can cascade into a series of problems that result in delayed care, rerouted patients, immense case backlogs that will take nights and weekends to clear through, and a permanent dent in that organization’s reputation. That is what motivated Chris and his team at McFarland to seek out medical imaging solutions that can reliably provide a backstop – and why they turned to Merge to provide those solutions.

The biggest source of imaging anxiety

McFarland experienced a recent downtime occurrence when an HL7 interface went down, subsequently causing their downstream PACS system to stop receiving imaging order messages. For many imaging organizations, this would be a nightmare scenario – a period of hours, days, even weeks, where the system stops receiving patient orders, images become backed up, diagnosis and treatment are delayed, and, once the dust has cleared, physicians have to sift through huge backlogs of images on top of the new ones already coming in every day.

Past downtime episodes had lasted up to months for McFarland. But this time around, the downtime lasted all of 15 minutes – thanks to Merge.

Thwarting downtime with the Merge portfolio

Before this downtime occurred, McFarland had implemented a suite of Merge medical imaging solutions – from Merge’s PACS system, to the Best in KLAS hemodynamic software and cardiology PACS solutions Merge Hemo and Merge Cardio, to Merge VNA enterprise imaging archive – which are designed with features meant to ensure uptime. These solutions not only helped improve workflows and consolidate patient information into a centralized system, they also helped insulate McFarland from the worst impacts of downtime.

Within two to three days, Merge was able to identify and resolve the root cause of the downtime. During that time, Merge enabled McFarland to rely on their backup system, switching the clinic’s radiologists over to a downtime worklist for studies that didn’t yet have matching orders while IT addressed the orders interface. The capability to pre-cache images on these worklists, also provided by Merge, was a huge help as it allowed radiologists to continue reading studies as if nothing had happened.

The end result was that, instead of what could have been another months-long slog to get service restored, the actual downtime period experienced was just 15 minutes – allowing McFarland to continue running seamlessly on the backup system, while Merge set about rectifying the issue afflicting the primary system.

Downtime may be impossible to predict, but it’s inevitable – it’s a matter of when, not if. That’s why it’s so crucial for imaging organizations to be proactive in their monitoring and pre-crisis downtime procedures. With a host of Merge imaging solutions at their disposal, and Merge support backing up their IT resources, McFarland was able to preconfigure and map out contingencies that ensured they could quickly pivot how their radiologists read patient studies, with little to no disruption to their workflow and to patient care.