Case Study

Chart hunting season is over.

"Every day I can see what a difference the new system makes," says Jennifer Aponte, Practice Administrator. "It's already cost-effective, and our physicians wholeheartedly embrace it. You save in telephone costs. Even the responsiveness to a patient or an outside physician improves. It gives physicians the ability to be collaborative with their peers, not only internally but also externally.

At Horizon Orthopedic, we have 5 offices with our physicians working out of at least two locations, so you can imagine how much interoffice communication is going on. Before we implemented a network infrastructure, each office utilized an independent phone system. Reaching other offices involved 9 digit dialing and one long distance toll call. Transmitting data was very outdated and inefficient: phone lines for phone calls; modem lines for practice management; courier to route films, charts and reports; faxes for memos. On top of that, we were paying all those modem and connectivity charges.

Pyron Technologies helped us to assess the available technology and implement a new way to connect the offices. Now we're able to send and receive voice, diagnostic images, reports and files, memos and correspondence through one connection. We have seen results, without a doubt.

In addition to patient charts we rely heavily on diagnostic MRI and X-ray films as a day-to-day part of treating patients. We used to have to rely on films being either hand carried by the patient or being transported between offices or the treating physician getting to the office to review a film. Now we can access our MRI images and reports from anywhere within our network. We can also print MRI and X-ray images on paper in any office as well.

Our doctors are the Team Physicians for the Cleveland Indians, which includes the major and entire minor league system. If they're at spring training, they can pull up a patient's image from Florida and look at it. Or they can pull up the system from home.

I would definitely recommend Pyron Technologies. A lot of people think they can find some part-time technology guy to help their practice. The advantage is he's cheap and can help trouble shoot, but the reality is because he's inexperienced he'll be learning on your dollar.

But when you're looking at efficiency from a strategic standpoint that's cost-effective over the long haul, you need a comprehensive team. The Pyron team is made up of people with very different networking, software, and hardware specialties who have the experience to put an integrated system together that is easy to maintain and cost effective to run."