Hospital-quality outpatient imaging is available in local community-based centers near physicians’ patients
Driving in heavily populated northern New Jersey can be demanding even at the best of times.
Add the worry that your patient, who might have cardiovascular disease, is driving in this stressful environment to obtain cardiovascular imaging recommended by you, and you have a prescription for additional stress.
To address this patient need, Englewood Hospital and Medical Center is working to make cardiovascular testing more convenient. The hospital system is bringing its high-quality imaging centers closer to patients’ own communities, nearer to their primary care physicians. The procedures are done as an outpatient service to save them the trip to the hospital.
Englewood Hospital’s three new outpatient locations offer nuclear cardiology, stress testing, echocardiography, vascular testing, and Holter monitoring. The practices are located at several sites in Fair Lawn, which is in Bergen County, and in Pompton Plains and Woodland Park, which are both in Passaic County.
The Cardiac Imaging Centers of Englewood Hospital and Medical Center join two Englewood Hospital satellite imaging facilities: Advanced Medical Imaging of Englewood Hospital and Medical Center in Emerson, Bergen County; and Magnus Imaging of Englewood Hospital and Medical Center in Glen Ridge, Essex County.
“The main issue is the convenience and the ease of access and the ease of booking testing for patients in their own communities,” said Mahesh Bikkina, MD, a cardiologist at Heart & Vascular Associates of Northern New Jersey, P.A. “Englewood Hospital is providing this hospital-quality outpatient service so the patient doesn’t need to go to the hospital for this testing.” The imaging centers maintain the same rigorous quality standards in their testing as those established by the hospital for testing performed at Englewood Hospital.
Dr. Bikkina acknowledged that patients tend to worry when they have to go for any test, but being able to travel within their own community and being close to home might eliminate some of that anxiety. “You pull into our parking lot and we are right there,” he said.
“Patients are much more comfortable having their tests done in a smaller, easier to navigate and comfortable outpatient setting,” Dr. Bikkina said.“Sometimes patients have multiple tests being done and our centers work very hard to schedule them all around the same time, which patients are very happy with.”
To further facilitate the care of patients, imaging results are added to patients’ electronic medical records, which are available to patients’ primary care physicians and doctors at Englewood Hospital if further referrals are needed. This creates a seamless flow of patients’ medical data among their physicians, which could substantially reduce the incidence of medical errors while serving to avoid inconvenient and costly duplications of testing.
Physicians can take advantage of the considerable expertise that Englewood Hospital, a leading cardiovascular center, has. The care that it provides goes beyond hospital-quality diagnostic testing and the comprehensive interchange of medical data.
Posted September 2017
Hospital-quality outpatient imaging is available in local community-based centers near physicians’ patients