If your organization offers ECG testing at a number of testing locations over a wide geographical area, you are probably facing demands that can only be met by an ECG management system with sophisticated test routing capabilities. In our experience, these demands are based on clinical, operational and marketing needs arising from some of the following situations:
- some Ordering Physicians have preferences as to the Cardiologist that will interpret their tests;
- some Ordering Physicians request that your clinic perform the test and send the test data back to the Ordering Physicians for interpretation;
- you utilize a Pediatric Cardiologist to interpret all pediatric ECG tests;
- some of the tests you acquire require STAT treatment; or
- for logistical reasons, you need to print and deliver test results from regional locations.
In all of these circumstances, you must be sure that your system will transmit each test from the testing site to the correct Cardiologist, then to the correct printing location and then into a centralized database. Here are some questions you can ask in order to be certain that the ECG management system that you are looking at will satisfy your data routing needs:
- Can your system identify and segregate tests that are not intended to be interpreted?
- Can your system identify, segregate and highlight STAT tests?
- Can your system identify and transmit all appropriate tests to our Pediatric Cardiologist?
- Can your system transmit any specific test to any specific Cardiologist, on a test-by-test basis?
- Can your system transmit tests from multiple testing sites to the same, specific Cardiologist?
- Can your system route an interpreted test to a specific print server, on a test-by-test basis?
- Will all tests be stored in a single database, regardless of where the test was taken, where it was interpreted and where it was printed?
