CardiologyThe Business of Imaging

Same-Day OB-GYN Ultrasound Results Across 3 Offices with Studycast

Sun Life Health | Arizona

Practice facts Sun Life Health OB/GYN

Specialty Women's health

Providers 5 OB-GYN physicians, 2 certified nurse-midwives, 5 advanced-practice providers

Locations 3

EMR eClinicalWorks

OB-GYN patients treated annually 45,000

650-680

OB-GYN ultrasounds per month

70%

growth in monthly scan volume over 4 years

Same-day

preliminary report to the reading physician

1–2 days

to onboard a new sonographer on Studycast

Meet Dr. Danielle Herried

Dr. Danielle Herried is OB-GYN department director at Sun Life Health, a federally qualified health center serving Arizona's East Valley and Pinal County. Three days a week she's seeing patients or operating and taking calls. The other two she's running a department that has to keep pace with one of the fastest-growing regions in the country.

Sun Life's mission is to help all people achieve their healthiest lives. And its patients arrive from every corner of the insurance map: uninsured, underinsured, Medicaid, Medicare, and commercial. Roughly 70% of them face economic, access, or social obstacles to health care with transportation being the most common. When a patient already struggles to reach an appointment, an outside imaging referral can often bring care to a grinding halt.

The Challenge

Arizona’s population has ballooned over the past decade and a half, and the supply of physicians has been unable to keep up. Dr. Herried cites a projection that the East Valley could have dozens fewer women's health providers than it needs by 2030. As demand outpaces the supply of providers, practices like Sun Life strive to keep up with that demand by expanding and adding offices, sonographers, and reading providers.

For a busy three-location OB-GYN department, any weak link in the workflow is punishing. If imaging is slow, inconsistent, or delegated to an outside facility, the whole department feels it: scans back up, diagnoses wait, and patients get pushed out to imaging centers or even the ER. A woman with pelvic pain or a possible ectopic pregnancy cannot endure a two-or three-day wait for a scan, another stretch for the read, and a phone call after that.

The Solution

Sun Life Health runs its own imaging in-house. Images and measurements transfer automatically from the machines into Studycast, complete a preliminary report the same day, and send it to reading physicians to finalize.

Every office runs the same imaging workflow, and because Studycast centralizes every study on a single cloud-based platform, the department can expand into new sites and onboard new staff while maintaining quality processes and imaging across locations. Since the images and measurements are already in Studycast moments after they're captured, the ordering provider has the preliminary result the same day, with final reports following in two to three days. When a sonographer spots something concerning, the reading provider can pull the study up and finalize it immediately, no matter where they are.

Major Perks

Answers in the Exam Room

During a patient visit, Dr. Herried can pull up a patient's images and review them on the spot, rather than describing findings secondhand.

"We'll pull those images up and walk through them together at the appointment, and they just absolutely love that," she says.

Patients leave their appointment at Sun Life Family Health Center with a better understanding of their results.

One Unified Workflow Across All Locations

Sun Life's patients are spread across greater Phoenix and the surrounding region, and many are scanned close to home, at whichever office serves their community. Studycast makes it easy to scale.

"Every patient gets the exact same experience seeing our sonographers at any location, and they can expect their reports back in the same amount of time," Dr. Herried says. "There's no fluctuation across our clinics of how we do the reports, what the prelim looks like, or who is reading them."

Onboarding New Sonographers is Easy

As Sun Life adds sonographers to keep up with volume, training them on Studycast is easy. "They probably focus on Studycast only a day or two when onboarding, and spend the rest of the time on technical ultrasound skills," Dr. Herried says.

Because Studycast is quick to learn, her lead sonographer trains new hires on it herself. When Dr. Herried talks about scaling the department, she puts the technology last on her list of concerns: "100%, the very least of my worries."

A Week is Too Long to Wait for an Answer

Recently, Dr. Herried had an ER follow-up on her schedule, a woman she'd never met, sent home from the local emergency room two days earlier with an inconclusive scan and more questions than answers. The patient was pregnant, with a difficult obstetric history and left-sided pain that raised the possibility of an ectopic pregnancy.

At another imaging center, the process would have been familiar and slow. She would have been scheduled in two or three days, waited for a physician to read the scan, and then someone would eventually deliver the results with a phone call. Dr. Herried skipped all of it. She scanned the patient the same day, and because the study was in Studycast the instant it was captured, she read it herself right there in the room. The patient went home with a plan, and the peace of mind she'd come in for. And she never went back to the ER.

The bottom line: A patient with a possible ectopic can't afford to wait days for an outside imaging center to fit her in. As soon as the sonographer at Sun Life Family Health Center completes the exam, the images upload straight into Studycast, ready to interpret.

"Having the ability to manage an urgent case same-day is just gold standard. That's how it should be for everybody,” Dr. Herried says. "I've seen patients with urgent cases come in and I'm wondering, how was this not diagnosed a week ago? How are you sitting here miserable this long?"

What our customers say

Photo of Dr. Danielle Herried — "With Studycast, we will pull the patient’s images up and actually walk through them with the patient at the time of the appointment, and they just absolutely love that."

Dr. Danielle Herried
OB-GYN department director

Favorite Features

One Screen for Images and Reporting

Dr. Herried and her reading providers rely on Studycast's fast-loading cine loops, annotation, and remeasurement inside the study. "It makes it very simple to quickly pull up reports, look through the images, annotate, remeasure," she says. "I like the cines a lot, and my reading providers like all of those abilities."

Easily View Patient Priors

Studycast lets Dr. Herried set today's scan alongside one from a past visit. She tracks how a fibroid has grown, or settles which ovary a prior surgery removed when a patient can't remember. "That helps me make better clinical decisions," she says.

As Patient Demand Grows, Sun Life Health Grows With It

Sun Life Health has spent a decade scaling women's health care across a region that keeps outrunning its supply of providers, and it has done so without once rethinking how it handles imaging.

New offices open, and new sonographers and reading providers come aboard. A new four-story campus in Casa Grande recently pulled primary care, pediatrics, OB-GYN, mammography, lab, and pharmacy under one roof. Through all of it, Studycast has remained the constant, growing seamlessly alongside the practice, with the same login and workflow in every exam room.

At Sun Life Family Health Center, Studycast has quietly done its job for a decade while Dr. Herried focused her attention on what matters: providing quality patient care. "I see no reason why we would ever switch,” she says.

For a department whose mission is providing women with efficient, high-quality care, Studycast’s reliability through a fast end-to-end workflow may be its greatest benefit.