Ok, I have some more shit to bitch about. Today at work I really got to thinking about my experiences since leaving the military nearly 3 years ago. Since then I’ve worked driving a school bus, spent a year at the university, and now work in radiology doing gopher work while I wait for my seat to come up in the radiology program at the community college. I got to thinking about it today because I got a taste of what the wall can be like when people are afraid or unwilling to venture beyond their realm in the workplace.

My job on the weekend is to watch a fax machine. There is a little more involved besides watching the machine, of course. When it starts humming I have to take care of the shit that comes through, route the paperwork to the radiologist and process it when he is through with it. I work for a company that basically hires out it’s radiologists to some of the hospitals in the area, and they have a system set up on a network that allows them to view at a central location any of the pictures taken at the various sites they deal with. My job deals with the paperwork from remote sites, but there are also studies done at the hospital I work in that have to be processed, except that I am not responsible for that stuff, the people that work for the hospital are.

This creates a problem, because when something needs to be taken care of concerning the studies done at our hospital, the radiologist asks me to look into it. Of course one would immediately assume this is what I want to bitch about, doing shit I’m not responsible for, but there’s more. See, I don’t mind doing the extra shit, they don’t give me enough to do as it is on the weekend, and I can only stare at my homework for so long. The problem is some shit happened today, and the radiologist asked me to find out some things about some cases he needed to do reports on. The cases show up on our computer system, but the paperwork doesn’t. With most of the cases the company handles, the paperwork is stored on the system right along with the images that are stored for every single study. A study is a set of pictures taken with an MR or CT machine, which are stored in digital format rather than on x-ray films as they are other places. A couple of the hospitals employ systems that can’t link to ours, so any paperwork has to be done the old fashioned way.

So I trek over to the film library and ask them about it. A guy in there tells me he would look into it, and I make a mental note to get back with them if the radiologist doesn’t get what he needs in a reasonable amount of time. Well, the dude was cool with everything, but he calls me and tells me there is nothing because the radiologists that did the preliminary reports, a guy that works for our company as well, didn’t fax the paperwork back.

Here I must delve into an explanation of how the system works, or how it is supposed to anyway. A patient is has a study done, be it an x-ray, CAT scan, or MRI scan. The images are stored digitally on a central computer, along with any paperwork related to the study. The company I work for performs the actual scans, and also provides the radiologists to read the resulting images, as well as images produced by the hospitals they deal with. Usually, especially if the patient is in the emergency room or has been admitted, the physicians taking care of them want to know as soon as possible what the radiologist can determine from looking at the images, whether there are any specific problems with the patients health. He finds this out when the radiologist faxes him a handwritten preliminary report. It’s called a preliminary report because that’s what it is, the initial findings. He, or another radiologist later on, will produce an official report by dictating his findings into a machine that is transcribed by someone else. What’s important is that the initial report, along with the official final report, get attached to the study somehow. In our system it’s all done electronically, but some hospitals still keep hard copies, which consist of a jacket of films with the appropriate paperwork attached. For us, once this stuff is put into the system, the radiologist can do what he needs to do no matter where he is. They even do this shit at home, although those stations on the network are very slow, because few people have T-lines running to their houses.

During the week the company has doctors at the various sites, and stationed in the hospitals to read the studies that are done. On the weekend, there are only a few radiologists, and any paperwork is routed to them via facsimile if it can’t be produced locally from the system. The particular doctor I work with is specifically qualified to read studies done of the nervous system, he’s called a neuroradiologist, and the company has only a few so qualified, which means they can only have one working on the weekend. Again, my job is to process all the paperwork for the studies he handles from the various sites, except for the paperwork generated locally in the hospital where he is physically located. For that, the hospital staff is supposed to give him clerical/technical assistance.

The important thing here is that the necessary information get to the physician that has cognizance over the patients getting the work done in a timely manner. That is the reason for the existence of the company I work for, they can get this information to the doctors more efficiently than the hospitals are able to on their own because everything involved, equipment and people, is concentrated.

That is the way it is supposed to be anyway. Therein lies the problem, because you have company staff interacting with hospital staff. Our goal is to be efficient, at least that’s the idea. We have our share of layabouts, but it seems the hospitals have more people willing to do as little as possible.

to be continued....