The story at a glance
- Northern Light Medical Management reads over 1.5 million imaging studies annually, with plans to grow rapidly – doubling yearly in volume. To support that growth, Northern Light needs to build up radiologist capacity and make it easier for radiologists – on-site and remotely – to access and read images.
- To support this growth, Northern Light leverages Merge Imaging Suite for Teleradiology, to consolidate workflows associated with their numerous hospital and health system clients and make images accessible via teleradiology services to credentialed remote radiologists.
- Leveraging teleradiology solutions allows Northern Light to reduce burnout and improve work-life balance for their radiologists, while also creating new efficiencies in their tech stacks and costs.
How Northern Light scales teleradiology services with medical imaging solutions
Radiologist shortages, rising costs, and inefficient technologies are creating significant headwinds for healthcare organizations across the country. As imaging volumes grow and burnout impacts radiologist retention, many health systems struggle to provide timely, high-quality radiology services.
Northern Light Medical Management, a privately owned diagnostic and interventional radiology practice, has developed a successful model to help healthcare organizations address these challenges head-on. In partnering with Merge, they have built a robust technology infrastructure that supports scalable teleradiology services and enhances radiologist capacity — improving work-life balance, burnout, and turnaround times – all of which helps improve patient care.
This blog explains how Northern Light leverages Merge teleradiology solutions to streamline workflows and create robust remote radiology coverage, all to the benefit of healthcare provider organizations, radiology teams and patients alike.
Consolidating tech stacks to create a unified teleradiology workflow
A primary challenge facing radiology practices is managing disparate radiology PACS across the multiple hospitals and health systems that they serve. As these hospitals and health systems seek efficiencies through acquisitions and mergers, they often lead to cluttered technology stacks, creating data silos and disconnected processes that hinder efficient medical imaging reading and sharing. This fragmentation makes workflows less efficient for reading teams and can delay patient care.
Northern Light addressed this by using Merge Imaging Suite for Teleradiology to connect with all of their client’s imaging systems for a unified view across all cases to be read. From there, imaging workflows were consolidated into a single, unified worklist that all of the reading physicians can work from. This provides radiologists across sites or geographies with a single, consolidated view of all medical imaging studies including their urgency, SLA, and status – regardless of the originating hospital's native PACS, RIS or, EMR/HER systems.
This has helped Northern Light to further build out their teleradiology services, allowing for many benefits. A few of these include:
- Centralized reading environment: Radiologists can log into one system to access studies, no matter where the image was taken or where the radiologist is reading it. This eliminates the need to switch between different systems interfaces, which simplifies workflows and reduces workloads for clinicians.
- Balancing workloads across reading teams: A common worklist allows for better load balancing. Studies can be distributed automatically among available radiologists, including subspecialty radiologists, ensuring faster turnaround times and preventing bottlenecks.
- Seamless data exchange: Merge’s vendor neutral archive ensures that medical images are easily accessible and shareable across the enterprise, breaking down data silos and providing a comprehensive patient view.
“We can’t manage practices of this size only by reading off hospitals’ systems. Reading off Merge is essential to how we run our practices.”
-- Patrick Santore Jr., Founding Partner and CEO, Northern Light Medical Management
This commitment to a unified workflow is a cornerstone of Northern Light’s ability to provide consistent, high-quality teleradiology services at scale.
A new model for work-life balance through remote radiology support
Radiologist shortages are a real problem across the country, compounding the pressures on an already overstressed, overburdened role. Rigid work environments that force radiologists into dark reading rooms for their entire shift only further contribute to this burnout and make recruitment of new radiologists more difficult. Northern Light tackles this by creating a flexible and supportive work culture, made possible by Merge's teleradiology solutions.
Merge Imaging Suite Solution for Teleradiology is built on a cloud-native foundation, which allows patient images from various on-site locations to be securely accessed from anywhere and on any device. This capability is central to Northern Light's hybrid staffing model, which allows radiologists to mix their time between on-site and remote telerad image reading as needed to accommodate their schedules. This hybrid model is a significant departure from the traditional five-days-a-week on-site mandate and has been a major factor in their ability to attract top talent. In less than two years, they have successfully filled 180 radiologist roles.
The Merge infrastructure makes this flexibility possible by supporting a seamless remote radiology workflow. Radiologists working from home have the same access to medical imaging studies and tools as their on-site counterparts, ensuring no disruption to patient care. This allows for various work arrangements, including day shifts, fractional work, or fully remote positions, catering to the individual needs of their medical professionals.
Fractional radiology
The scalability of Merge's platform also enables a cost-effective approach called "fractional radiology."
Many healthcare organizations face imaging volumes that don't quite justify hiring another full-time radiologist. If a practice has enough work for, say, 1.5 radiologists, then hiring a second full-time radiologist to cover that extra load drives up costs unnecessarily. Northern Light’s platform-driven approach to this issue is to utilize Merge’s remote radiology capabilities to assign that extra fractional workload to available radiologists remotely.
This approach allows hospitals to manage their caseloads efficiently without the expense of hiring on more full-time staff than are actually necessary.
Building a resilient future for teleradiology
Northern Light’s story demonstrates the transformative power of strategically using market-leading medical imaging solutions for building up robust teleradiologist support that is enhancing workflows and quality of life for reading physicians.
By leveraging Merge Imaging Suite Solution for Teleradiology, Northern Light has built a scalable, efficient, and resilient business model that not only addresses the most pressing challenges facing care teams today – it also sets them up to achieve their goals of becoming the largest independent radiology practice in the United States by 2028. Their success at rapid, organic growth powered by a scalable teleradiology platform offers a clear blueprint. Other healthcare organizations can look to Northern Light Medical Management or best practices to optimize their radiology services, improve patient care, and create a more sustainable work environment for their radiologists.
