Springdale-based Arkansas Children's Northwest is one of the first hospitals in the nation to enable remote control of cardiac MRI and CT scans, it said in a Dec. 16 news release.
After six years of building the program, the system deployed the Radiology Operations Command Center on July 1. The command center program is manufactured by Phillips and allows imaging physicians to directly observe and perform scans remotely. It has expanded imaging options to patients in rural communities who would otherwise have to travel to a larger hospital for scans.
"Because it's so complicated, we have not been able to offer these imaging services anywhere other than ACH," Markus Renno, MD, cardiologist and director of advanced cardiovascular imaging at Arkansas Children's Hospital and associate professor of pediatrics and radiology at the Little Rock-based University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, said in the news release. "Now, we offer one cardiac MRI per week by combining the ROCC with our Little Rock cardiac technologists and our ACNW scanners and team partners. In mid-August, we began offering unlimited cardiac CTs per week."