Overnight teleradiology services.

What overnight coverage includes

The overnight block runs from 10 PM to 7 AM, the stretch when most hospital-based radiology groups have gone home and the emergency department keeps ordering. In practice that means CT for headaches, chest pain, abdominal pain and falls; X-rays from the ED and the floors; ultrasound where your techs scan overnight; and the inpatient studies that can’t wait until morning.

Overnight is the most common place to start, but it rarely stands alone forever. The same radiologists, templates and critical list can extend into evening / swing hours, daytime overflow, weekends and holidays, or 24/7 coverage on the same agreement. Start where it hurts most and add hours later.

Overnight coverage does not replace your day radiology group. It covers the hours they don’t, and it hands the night back to them at 7 AM with a short note on what was read and what was called. Your group keeps its days, its relationships with your medical staff and its role in your hospital; it simply stops carrying the nights.

How a night works, hour by hour

Nothing about the night depends on someone at your hospital remembering to do something special. Every night follows the same steps:

• Orders arrive by HL7. Your system sends each order to us the moment it is placed, so the radiologist knows a study is coming.
• Images arrive by secure routing to our PACS. We read on our PACS, so there is nothing for your staff to install or run.
• Stroke studies are read first. A stroke study goes to the top of the worklist ahead of routine work.
• Criticals are called within 15 minutes to your ED, read back, and logged with the name, role and time of the person who took the call.
• Signed finals go back into your system in your format, so the report in the chart is the report of record.
• A named backup reader is on every night, already credentialed at your hospital, and your team has one number answered by a person.
• At 7 AM your day group gets a handoff note: what we read and what we called overnight.

The full connection and go-live steps are on how it works.

Final reads, not preliminaries

Some overnight services issue preliminary reads: a quick interpretation to guide the ED, which your own radiologists then re-read and sign in the morning. That model keeps your day group doing night work, just later. Every TeleRads overnight report is a signed final, read in the US by a board-certified radiologist, so the day group starts the morning with a handoff note instead of a stack of studies to re-read.

If you are weighing the two models, our guide to preliminary vs final radiology reads walks through when each one makes sense and what to ask a vendor.

What your hospital needs to do

Less than most teams expect. Every radiologist who reads for you is licensed in your state and approved by your medical staff office before reading a single study. We build and chase each credentialing file through an NCQA-certified credentials verification organization (CVO), built to Joint Commission standards; your office reviews and approves.

On the technical side, your IT team points HL7 orders and image routing to us and we send signed reports back. We sign a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with every hospital. Most hospitals are live in 30 days.

How to judge an overnight provider

Whoever you choose, these questions separate a vendor you can rely on at 3 AM from one you’ll be chasing:

• Are overnight reports signed finals or preliminaries that your group must re-read?
• Who exactly reads for you, and are they licensed in your state and privileged at your hospital?
• How are critical results communicated, and is every call documented with a read-back?
• Is there a named backup on every night, or does coverage depend on one person?
• Will you get a monthly report that shows the misses as well as the averages?
• Are there surcharges for STAT, after-hours or weekend reads? Our page on how teleradiology pricing works covers what to look for.

TeleRads answers each of these in writing. Every month you get a scorecard you can hold us to, and any read outside our turnaround isn’t charged.

Questions