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Obviously, when you have the term sales in your title, that gives a little bit of idea about what your motivation is but not today. My motivation today is to provide an overview of NightHawk, teleradiology in general, and an idea about where things might be in a few years.
William G. Bradley, Jr, MD, PhD, FACR, who is the chief of radiology at University of California, San Diego, is a kind of a guru in the magnetic resonance imaging field. In the early 1990s, he was taking calls at the central reading facility for a group of hospitals, covered by a group of radiologists in Southern California. They had very little ability to aggregate very many studies at the same time, and so the radiologists did a little bit of this when they were on call.
Here is just a brief overview of this presentation: How has radiology changed with technology?What are the barriers? What are the limitations? And what value has telemedicine added to radiology?
The first marketing piece that we sent out in 2001 focused on the main crux of why we started NightHawk. The radiology department manager or the business manager for a radiology group can look haggard because covering night calls is tough. The impetus for NightHawk was just to take this very small segment of very unproductive work for radiologists and be able to allocate that time better from nighttime to daytime.
The interesting part about what we decided to do was to locate the radiologists in a place that was very attractive for them to take night calls from, and that happened to be Sydney, Australia.
There was the redeployment of radiologist hours; the unproductive time was really the motivating factor for radiology groups all around the country that wanted to outsource their night calls. It just did not make very much sense for a radiologist to be up in the middle of the night taking 6 cases and then not being able to be productive the next day. It just made a whole lot more sense for that doctor to be very productive the next day and to better allocate that time.
There were lifestyle issues as well, because nobody wants to be up in the middle...