CardiologyThe Business of Imaging

Studycast Powers Cardiology Practice Built on Early Intervention

Central Florida Heart Care | Maitland, FL

Practice facts Central Florida Heart Care
Specialty Preventative cardiology
Providers 5
Locations 2
Studycast Brand Image - 31

250

Hospital 61

studies completed per month

24 hours

average turnaround time for echo reports

80% decrease

in turnaround time

Meet Dr. Neel R. Patel

Premature heart disease within his own family gave Dr. Neel R. Patel a personal stake in challenging the standard model of cardiac care, which often intervenes only after disease has progressed. As founder and CEO of Central Florida Heart Care, Patel built his practice around prevention rather than the more familiar cycle of stenting and bypass after the fact.

“Early detection, education, and prevention⁠—that's the mission. If you give patients the information early, you empower them to make better decisions at an earlier stage,” Dr. Patel says. He's seen patients walk into his office feeling fine and walk out scheduled for open heart surgery. Achieving this requires imaging, conversation with the patient, and enough time in each visit to put the full picture together.

Central Florida Heart Care has grown from a single office with two staff to five providers across two locations, and Dr. Patel has used Studycast for nearly the entire life of the practice, having been one of the first physicians in Central Florida using it and recommending it to others.

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The Challenge

Before Studycast, getting a single echo read and reported at Central Florida Heart Care took eight or nine separate steps. Someone had to download the images, someone else typed up the report, and the whole thing could take days to land back on Dr. Patel's desk. "It was that bad," he says.

Dr. Patel needed a system that could keep pace with a full day of preventive visits—fast enough that he wasn't waiting on a report while a patient sat in the exam room, and precise enough that nothing about the read compromised the diagnosis.

The Solution

Studycast collapses the multi-step, manual process it once took for Dr. Patel to get an echo read and reported into one continuous motion. His patient's images load on one screen, the structured report populates on the other, and measurements move from the machine straight into the worksheet. Dr. Patel can split the screen into four or more images at once and move through a study in minutes.

Studycast’s retrieval speed also lets Dr. Patel do something a slower system wouldn't support. He reads most studies twice—once when it's first taken, and again right before he walks into the exam room, so he can correlate the images with the patient sitting in front of him. Additionally, he’s able to pull up images on an iPad mid-visit, so his patient can see, on screen, exactly what's happening inside their own heart as he walks them through it.

Major Perks

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A Second Look Just a Click Away


Dr. Patel pulls a study back up moments before walking into the exam room to correlate it with the patient in front of him. Studycast's retrieval speed turns a pre-visit reread into protocol for every patient.
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Imaging Patients Can See for Themselves


Dr. Patel casts images straight to an iPad in the exam room, walking patients through their own imaging instead of describing it secondhand. For a practice built on informed, empowered patients, it's the mission playing out in the room.
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Growth Without New Infrastructure


Adding a second location and a growing roster of providers hasn't required new servers or additional ramp time. Each provider logs into the same cloud-based system while Dr. Patel reads his colleague's studies from home, or from the beach on vacation, with nothing extra to install or manage.

Outpacing the Next Cardiac Event

Speed compounds quickly across a growing practice. Studycast removes the backlog that used to cap how many patients Central Florida Heart Care could screen in a day, so studies move through on schedule instead of piling up behind a slow read.

"The biggest bottleneck for us has always been imaging⁠—retrieving it and reading it before the patient even comes into the office," Dr. Patel says. "Once that's instant, the whole workflow is faster, and we can see more patients in a day."

Preventive cardiology lives or dies on volume and throughput. Every patient Dr. Patel sees before symptoms surface is another opportunity to intervene before damage accumulates, often marking the difference between a single cardiac event and a return trip to the hospital.

"We have a lot of patients who've had cardiac events, but they never go to the hospital again, because what we've done is working," he says. "They don't have recurrent heart attacks or strokes. That's what drives me to keep going."

What our customers say

Favorite Features

Dual View Reporting


Before Studycast, reading an echo consisted of toggling between the imaging viewer and a separate report program—closing one window to open another anytime Dr. Patel needed to move from image to write-up.

Now, both live in the same view. As he explains, “the images are up on one screen, and the structured report is on the other, and I can read them instantaneously. Instead of closing one screen and opening another, I do it all in one shot.”

 

Auto-Populated Measurements & Drop-Downs


Central Florida Heart Care’s old process required reading measurements like chamber size and ejection fraction off the ultrasound machine and typing them into the report by hand. This one step used to stretch a single echo into eight or nine separate touches before it was ready to send.

Dr. Patel says, “the numbers transition in easily, so everything we need to write the report is already there, and the drop-downs are simple to use.”

Multi-Site Access Without a Server


Dr. Patel has firsthand experience with the extreme lag one must deal with just to pull up an image in a hospital running remote reads through its own server. Because Studycast is cloud-based and runs entirely in the browser, providers at either of his two locations can open the same study quickly.

As Dr. Patel puts it, “it's web-based, so two providers can look at the same imaging from two different sites without the overlay of a server. That's huge.”

Dr. Patel's Mission Continues

Central Florida Heart Care has grown into five providers and two locations without slowing. Dr. Patel still reads most studies twice. He still gets a report to a referring physician the moment he signs it. He still logs in to the same system whether he's sitting in either office or reading from home. Studycast has protected and accelerated his practice's ability to scale, rather than letting growth slow it down.

Dr. Patel's goals for what comes next are just as grounded. He wants to read fast enough to stay ahead of the next patient. He wants to keep educating the ones already in the room. He wants to grow at a pace he can manage, not chase size for its own sake. Studycast has provided the infrastructure underneath that plan since nearly the beginning, letting a one-man preventive practice become a five-provider operation without ever pausing to rebuild how it reads and reports imaging.

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