Innovative and groundbreaking patient imaging is something that Zwanger-Pesiri Radiology in Long Island is fairly well known for. But they are also making unique strides in the way patients experience health care outside of the treatment room.
DOTmed News spoke with Joseph Funaro, the chief information officer at Zwanger-Pesiri, to talk about OneDx; an OEM independent, browser agnostic, zero footprint referring physician portal that Funaro says has transformed the way his facility shares diagnostic information.
DOTmed News: What exactly is OneDx?
Joseph Funaro: It is a patient and referring physician portal. One part provides medical results in the way of a report and images for the referring doctor, and on the patient side if provides the same thing in a bit of a truncated view; with a more simplified report and images.
We encouraged the developer to build a bunch of low tech / high tech communication tools into the product because we know there are a bunch of patients and referrers out there who are still not fully computer savvy. When viewing the report, a physician or a patient can choose to click a button saying "share this report."
If they want to send the report to another doctor, they punch in an e-mail address. An encrypted key is built for them, and they share the results securely with the doctor. If they want to fax, they can do that through the system too.
So, that's really it in a nutshell.
DOTmed News: Can you talk a little bit about how OneDx compares to products that work similarly?
JF: There are a multitude of products today that claim to be patient and referring physician products. A lot of them are solely browser based, a lot require little applets to be installed — whether it be Java or something like that. OneDx provides, in a single code-based fashion, a very familiar look across all platforms.
You go to website, put in password and user credential, then you can instantly load the dashboard for the referring doctor and present to him all of the patients he sent to Zwanger-Pesiri Radiology. At that point he can either open the report or the images, right in the browser via HTML 5.
DOTmed News: What benefits are associated with remote access for patients?
JF: Let's look at the traditional way; what we're moving away from; Johnny Smith comes in for an MRI of his brain and now wants to communicate those results to his primary care provider.
Well, maybe Johnny's on vacation and his doctor is in Florida. If we gave him a CD he would have to figure out on his own how to get the DICOM data set of the medical images and over to his doctor.
