Six Signs You Need a Telesonography® Solution

How can you tell if a telesonography (aka teleultrasound) solution is right for your facility—and your patients? As we’ve talked to more and more facilities about their pain points surrounding ultrasound, we’ve started to hear some common issues—signals that a facility could benefit from TeleScan® and the expertise of our remote telesonographer® experts.  

We’ve made note of these signs below. Take a look at our list and see if any of them resonate with you. If they do, it’s time to learn more about TeleScan. 

1. You’re not getting the greatest value from existing resources 

Resources like equipment and personnel are precious, but it can be frustrating to see that they aren’t being utilized to their fullest extent. Maybe you’ve noticed that: 

1. You have an ultrasound machine that sits unused—for hours or days at a time. 
2. The skilled healthcare professionals you hired are stuck doing low-skill work instead of focusing on high-value tasks. 
3. You're missing key experts, so you’re billing at a lower rate for low-skill ultrasound exams. 
4. The factors above are limiting your ability to scale up services to meet patient demand.

These problems are common across the ultrasound landscape—but that doesn’t mean they can’t be solved. Consider how TeleScan could partner with you to get the most from these valuable assets: 

• We can maximize the use of your existing ultrasound equipment. Telescan is coded for 2D so that we can connect with as many machines as possible. 
• We can train and certify your existing staff members to capture cine clips, helping them to practice at the highest level for their role. 
• We can provide perinatal sonography experts who can analyze high-level exams. 
• We can help you bill 30-40% more for exams completed by our certified experts. 
• We can scale with you via our monthly subscription tiers. Subscriptions are based on patient volume, enabling us to offer additional services as your patient base grows.

2. You can’t seem to hire enough sonographers  

As a sonography company, we’re all too familiar with the sonographer shortage. As the shortage continues, you may have noticed: 

1. Your sonographer openings require a hiring cycle of 180 days or more and often remain unfilled. 
2. Sonographer salaries are becoming increasingly expensive and your competitors are offering high sign-on bonuses. 
3. Your existing staff sonographers are overworked, leaving them burned out and prone to injury. 
4. In addition to increasing workloads, fallout from the Covid pandemic has resulted in high turnover rates. 

TeleScan was built to mitigate the negative outcomes of the shortage. Not only does telesonography provide another (pain-free) option to help sonographers elongate their careers, but it can also increase prenatal ultrasound access for your organization: 

• Our partners gain access to certified perinatal sonographers in as little as one month. Our telesonographers are the best of the best and hold OB/GYN and fetal echo registries as well as nuchal translucency, nasal bone, and CLEAR certifications. They also rotate back into the field to keep their scanning skills sharp. 
• Our partners can balance the workload between onsite sonographers and their remote counterparts. Adding teleultrasound to your offerings keeps your sonographers working at the top of their game while a diminished workload minimizes their potential for pain and injury. 
• Our partners can bypass offering large salaries and sign-on bonuses. We’ll also decrease your overhead costs by handling continued training and benefits like PTO and leave. 

3. You wish you could see more patients 

We have yet to meet a healthcare professional who doesn’t want to see prenatal services extended to underserved patients. But for many, it feels like wishful thinking because: 

1. Ultrasound examinations take a long time. 
2. Your doctors are always waiting on reports (sometimes for days or weeks depending on your situation). 
3. Your patients are waiting for four weeks or more for the next available appointment. 
4. With a long wait list and not enough staff or time in the day, you're forced to turn away patients.

We’ve seen the reality of these problems and the trouble they can cause for a community. We’ve also seen that increasing clinical efficiency and diminishing patient wait times are two of TeleScan’s biggest benefits: 

• TeleScan’s average exam time is 15-20 minutes. 
• Telesonographers turnaround reports in an average of 20-30 minutes. 
• These efficiency gains help to decrease the wait time until the next appointment by 50-75%. 
• With quicker appointment openings, and remote sonographers available via TeleScan, you can welcome new patients to your practice.

Psst... If you’d like to learn more about this topic, check out our peer-reviewed white paper. 

4. Ultrasound services are difficult to access 

In many underserved and rural areas, ultrasound services—and the sonographers to perform them—are scarce. Here’s what we’ve heard from these kinds of facilities: 

1. Your part-time or contract sonographer’s schedule makes it difficult to schedule in-house ultrasounds. 
2. Your facility hasn’t been able to hire a sonographer at all, and in-house ultrasound is totally unavailable to you. 
3. You try to partner with third-party imaging facilities but struggle to access appointments. 
4. Even when appointments are accessible, your doctors have difficulty tracking down third-party reports, resulting in extended wait times for patient results and consultations. 

We have a big heart for these kinds of facilities. It was a hospital just like this in Kansas that first set our founder’s wheels spinning. So, if these problems are your problems, TeleScan is designed to partner with you so that: 

• We can train your healthcare worker to capture the necessary cine clips. 
• We can use the telemedicine model to make ultrasound services accessible to every provider and their patients. 
• We can make in-house ultrasound appointments easy to schedule. 
• We can turn around high-quality diagnostics quickly and notify your doctors of report readiness. 

5. You’re sending patients elsewhere for ultrasound 

Related to difficulty accessing third-party ultrasound appointments is the struggle of getting your patients to attend them. You and your providers know ultrasound care is necessary, but you also know: 

1. Your patients will be uncomfortable visiting an unfamiliar third party. 
2. Your patients will likely have to make a longer trip to a third-party imaging center. 
3. Your patients will have to navigate unfamiliar parking and clinic buildings. 
4. All these challenges, combined with social determinants of health, make your patients more likely to cancel or no-show for third-party appointments. 
5. Even if your patient shows, you have no control over their exam experience. 

We understand how vital a piece patient experience is to the healthcare puzzle. If you’ve ever wished you could keep your patients in-house for ultrasound, partnering with TeleScan means: 

• You can offer TeleScan exams as an extension of a known provider’s care. 
• You can offer your patients a shorter travel time for ultrasound. 
• Your patients will be comfortable accessing familiar places and parking. 
• Your patients will be more likely to show for their in-house ultrasound appointment. 
• You will have control over the patient experience, as our solution utilizes your internal staff to provide high-touch, in-person care.

6. You feel like you’re facing an administrative nightmare 

Ugh, paperwork. Administrative processes can be so clunky and time-consuming. See if any of these issues sound familiar: 

1. Scheduling ultrasounds with third parties is chaotic. 
2. Third-party scheduling and follow-up tasks take time and effort from too many people. 
3. The administrative process is cumbersome. 
4. You have to use multiple disparate systems that don’t always work together well. 

We understand the necessity of administrative processes and tasks, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make them a little easier for you. With TeleScan: 

• You can bring ultrasound scheduling tasks in-house for single gestation growth scans, nuchal translucencies, anatomy scans, and biophysical profiles. 
• You can make scheduling quicker and easier—no more playing the middleman. 
• You can implement a seamless, linear workflow from scheduling to billing. 
• You can get a single end-to-end ultrasound solution that also provides reporting and storage. 

So, how many of these signs sound like they came straight from your facility? If you were nodding along the whole time, we hope you’ll give us the opportunity to talk about how TeleScan—backed by our perinatal sonography experts—could be the perfect solution for your facility.