X-rays and scans, read and kept in one place
The Imaging feature handles the journey of a scan — from the doctor requesting it, to the images being taken, to the radiologist's read reaching the patient. It is the companion to Laboratory, for the tests whose result is a picture and an opinion rather than a number.
What it does
- Offers a ready-made catalog of common studies — X-ray, CT, MRI, ultrasound, 2D and 3D echo, mammography and fluoroscopy — with the preparation each one needs.
- Lets doctors order imaging from the visit itself, or on its own, and mark it urgent.
- Tracks each study from ordered, to booked, to taken, to read.
- Accepts the images your machine produces and groups them by view — PA, lateral, whichever projections were taken. Files upload up to 100 MB each, in the background with a progress bar per file, so a large study does not tie up the form while it moves — and Add more files lets a repeat exposure or an extra projection land against the same view instead of forcing a second trip through the form.
- Shows them in a viewer built for looking properly: zoom, pan, full screen, and rotation in fine five-degree steps.
- Lets a doctor record findings against an individual image, not just the study as a whole.
- For dental clinics, lets each finding be pinned to the exact tooth and surface the odontogram uses — optional, and only where teeth are charted.
- Produces a signed radiology report as a printable PDF, with the doctor's signature and a verification code.
- Releases the read to the patient's own secure portal once it is signed.
- Tells the right people at the right moment: the technologists when a study is ordered, and the doctor who asked for it when the read is signed.
- Lets a radiologic technologist write up the read — the narrative, not just the pictures — and hand it to a doctor to sign.
- Keeps a clinic's own library of reusable result texts, so a normal chest X-ray does not get retyped from scratch every time.
- Can be ordered directly from an ongoing visit, with the patient locked to that visit and the study billed automatically.
- Emails a signed result to the patient, or to a contact person, as a secure link — never as an attachment.
Ordering from the visit
Imaging can be ordered straight from the appointment form, the same way laboratory tests are. Tick the studies, set the priority, and the order is opened when the appointment is booked — tied to that visit's reference number, so the scan sits alongside the same encounter's consultation, prescription and charges.
Studies you have not switched on cannot be ordered, and the price is copied onto the order as it stood that day, so later changes to your catalog never rewrite what a patient was quoted.
Ordering from the booking form bills the studies to the visit the moment the appointment is booked, the same as ordering from an ongoing visit does. A study your clinic has not priced yet is left off the bill rather than charged for free, and a warning names it so it can be added at the cashier.
Who does what
Writing the read and signing it are separate jobs, and the system keeps them separate.
A Radiologic Technologist — a role added for this feature — schedules the study, uploads the images, looks after the study catalog, and can now write the draft read itself: the technique, the findings, an impression. What they cannot do is put a doctor's name to it. The doctor reviews the draft (or writes one from scratch) and signs it — that is the act that makes it a report rather than notes. Front-desk staff can also send an already-signed result to a patient without being able to write or sign one.
The read, and the report
A report cannot be signed until every image is ready, and cannot be signed without an impression. Signing stamps the doctor's e-signature on the PDF and releases the study to the patient — before that, it is a draft and prints as one, crediting whoever last worked on it as its preparer.
If something needs correcting afterwards, editing a signed report records an amendment. The original signature stands; the report says plainly that it was revised.
A library of reusable results
A clinic can build up its own collection of result texts — a normal chest PA, a routine ultrasound — and reuse them from the report form with one click instead of retyping. Inserting one only fills in what that particular text covers, and never overwrites something already written without asking first.
Ordering from a visit, and billing
Imaging can also be started directly from a patient's ongoing visit rather than at booking time. The patient is locked to that visit so it cannot be pointed at the wrong chart, and studies with a set price are billed automatically to the same visit — a study your clinic has not priced yet is simply left off the bill rather than charged for free, and you are told which one so it can be added at the cashier.
Sending a result
Once a report is signed, it can be emailed straight to the patient — or to a listed contact person — as a link to the result itself, never as a file attachment. Each recipient gets their own link and their own one-time access code, so a contact person's copy never doubles as the patient's. Every link, including the patient's own, opens that one result and nothing else — no demographics, no billing, no message thread, no other study — and expires on its own or can be revoked from the report's Sent list. See Emailing results to patients and contacts for how sending, revoking and "send it again" requests work across every document type, not only imaging.
Reading a dental film tooth by tooth
A periapical or a panoramic is not read as one picture — it is read tooth by tooth. So a finding recorded against a dental image can optionally be pinned to the tooth it sits on, and to the surfaces involved: mesial, distal, buccal, and the rest.
It uses the same FDI numbering and the same surface names as your odontogram, so "16 — Upper Right 1st Molar (Distal)" means the same thing on the radiograph as it does on the chart. The surface names follow the tooth, as they should: the biting surface of a front tooth is incisal and of a back tooth occlusal, and the tongue side is palatal upstairs and lingual down.
It is optional throughout. A chest X-ray never asks. A dental film whose reader would rather write a sentence never has to. The section appears for clinics that chart teeth — those running the Dental module — and for dental practices, which read films this way whether or not they use the chart. Everyone else never sees it.
Where a tooth is pinned, it travels with the finding — onto the report the doctor writes from, and onto the printed report itself.
Nobody has to keep checking
When a study is ordered, the technologists who will take it are told. When the read is signed, the doctor who asked for it is told — and if the patient happens to be in a consultation at that moment, so is whoever is seeing them, which is often somebody else entirely.
Staff following a particular patient can also tick Imaging on that patient's notification settings, and hear about studies ordered, reports signed and orders cancelled for them alone.
Imaging notifications are their own kind, separate from consultations and from laboratory. That matters if you ever mute something: turning off consultation noise will not quietly turn off your radiology reports as well.
None of these messages carry the finding. An alert says a report was signed and gives you a link; the impression is behind that link, where the usual permissions and the access log apply.
Keeping images where they belong
Images are never left sitting in a public folder. Every one is served through the clinic's own login, and the untouched original file is reachable only by the people who take or read the studies.
Every copy anyone else sees — in the viewer, in the report, on the patient's portal — carries your clinic's name, the patient's name and the study date across the picture. A screenshot of a scan is still a screenshot; the marking is what makes an escaped copy traceable back to where it came from.
Preparing the display copies happens in the background, so uploading a large study returns immediately and the thumbnails appear a moment later.
Why it helps
For the clinic
Scans stop living in a shared drive and a stack of envelopes. Each one is attached to the patient, the visit and the doctor who asked for it.
For doctors
The images and the previous reads are where the rest of the history is, and the viewer is good enough to actually read from.
For radiologic technologists
A clear queue of what has been asked for and what still needs taking, with the preparation instructions the patient was given already on the order.
For patients
Once the doctor has signed, the result appears in their own portal — the impression and what to do next, with the images alongside it. Nothing appears before it has been read, because an unread scan is not an answer.
A study is released to the patient only when its report has been signed. Images that have been taken but not yet read are deliberately not shown — a picture without a radiologist's opinion is not something to draw conclusions from.
This is an optional feature your clinic can switch on when needed. Without it, a doctor can still record an imaging finding by hand on the visit's medical record.