I went to the hospital the other day to have the mysterious pain in my foot investigated. The IT and process in the hospital has improved a lot since the last time I was in a casualty ward.
They move you through the different ‘queues’ on the management system they have. The head doctor meets every patient entering the ward, and decides immediately whether to send you for an x-ray or not – this means you don’t have to sit around in one queue, get told you need an x-ray after an hour, then sit in another queue for the x-ray for another hour.
Then, when they take the x-ray, it goes straight onto a digital plate so there’s no sitting around to wait for it to be developed. The doctor sees it on-screen (and the image is incredibly clear, compared to old-style film x-rays) and then decides what he’s going to do with you next.
(I was lucky, it was just a strain.)
Actually, the old-style developed-negative transparencies are *really* high-resolution. Catherine broke her little finger a while back, and it’s amazing the detail you could see in the transparency; I could have diagnosed it!
(interesting that they still use the analog plates here, but charge roughly 10x the price you’re being charged I’d reckon. US healthcare == a racket)
Yeah, you get lots of detail on film alright, but the problem seems to be that the processing is sometimes terrible (although if you’re paying USD 200 for an x-ray, they probably change the developer in the machine a little more often).