Digital x-rays and sharing information.

You should be very interested in this subject. As a patient, digital information enables you to have your records taken and maintained extremely efficiently. The digital x-rays that my office takes, expose you to only one third of the radiation that the more conventional other types of digital systems need. We use a phosphor plate system which is also more convenient and comfortable. The plates that we use are sealed in plastic envelopes and then processed in a few seconds. This allows for the images to be read almost immediately and, if needed, be retaken to get the best image possible. If an x-ray needs to be retaken, then you are still exposed to 1/3 less radiation than one image would require with a totally electronic system. From my perspective this is something that is taken for granted due to the fact that we have been using our phosphor sensor system for close to 3 years now.

Just yesterday we had a patient in our office that needed to be sent to a specialist. We took a couple of x-rays and then emailed those directly to the specialist for review before the patient even arrived in spite of the fact that he left our office and went directly to the other doctor's office. What a wonderful benefit!

We can transfer these images to other continents or provide them to patients who are traveling. They can easily be attached to emails just like photos. The images can be stored in a patient's home computer or on their thumb drive. We typically send the images as 'jpeg' files which are the same as your digital photos. This means that they can be viewed on your home computer if you wish.

We also backup all of the office data on a daily basis and have the data, when taken, stored on a computer server at our office which has a dual hard drive 'RAID' system built into it. 'RAID' means literally, "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Drives". If our computer server has a hard drive failure then it notifies us of the problem and still has a good copy of the data on the 2nd drive. The backup that we make daily is a placed on a portable drive that goes home with me daily. We rotate 5 drives from home to office in order to have multiple copies for the ultimate in safety.

This discussion was prompted by one of our patients that was in on Monday. If you have something that is of interest to you that you would like to see me discuss here, please let me know.