Stanford Hospital and Clinics Computed Tomography Section

Posted 3:42 PM, March 17, 2008, by jaruiz

From left to right: Reuben Brown, Michele Thomas, Kim Piter, James Soriano, Amy Wu, and Monglan Duong.

By Julie Ruiz, PhD
(Image courtesy of Mark Riesenberger)

As a former member of the Enterprise Access Team, CT Supervisor Michele Thomas is helping to transform patient care at Stanford Hospital and Clinics (SHC) by changing the way health care is delivered. Along with the other groups that comprise the Epic Design Parameters Teams, the Enterprise Access Team met for over five months to analyze current state workflows throughout SHC, including scheduling, discharging, and documenting. As the representative for Radiology, Ms. Thomas and her team discovered that patients need better access to radiological services.

Over the years, the CT section has been working to improve health care at SHC. When Ms. Thomas first began working as a part-time staff technologist in the CT section in May of 1989, there were only two GE 9800 CT scanners at SHC. There was no helical scanning, only axial. Around 1991, the section added their first Siemens Somatom helical scanner, which was located in the mobile building in the parking lot for 18 months until Blake Wilbur was built.

Shortly after Ms. Thomas became the CT supervisor in 2001, SHC added a 16-slice GE scanner, bringing the total number in the hospital to three by 2002. By April of 2008, SHC will have replaced its oldest single-slice scanner with a new GE 64-slice scanner. Until this replacement is complete, the CT section is using a 16-slice multidetector-row CT mobile scanner. Once the installation of the 64-slice scanner is complete, the CT section will be able to perform cardiac scanning on inpatients for the first time ever. Currently, this procedure is only available to outpatients at Blake Wilbur. These advances in technology also require more complicated protocols, and the CT section now does many more protocols than before such as CT IVPs, CT enterography, CT angiography, as well as biphasic pancreas and biphasic liver scans.

Alongside the rapid technological growth, the CT section has experienced an increase in staff. In 1989, the CT section had about two to three CT technologists working the day shift and two technologists staffing the evening shift. Now, they have four to five technologists during the day shift and three to four in the evenings. Most of the hiring is done within Stanford and most of the technologists are diagnostic technologists who have been cross trained in CT. Ms. Thomas described her staff as "energetic multitaskers" who work closely with the fellows and residents in a very busy and fast-paced section. The dedicated staff of the CT section have won various awards such as the Wingspread Award, which is given by one employee to another who has proven that he or she is a "special performer" by demonstrating exemplary job performance. Michele Thomas, Monglang Duong, and Mark Donnelly have all been awarded a Wingspread Award for their outstanding contributions to CT.

In the future, Ms. Thomas hopes that the opening of Palo Alto Imaging and the Stanford Medicine Outpatient Center (Redwood City) will help to decrease the number of outpatients scheduled at the hospital so that they can respond more quickly to the needs of their inpatients.