Cutting Stat Report Turnaround to Under 4 Hours
Inside the workflow changes that doubled our stat reporting speed across the network — and what it means for your urgent cases.
Last year, our average stat report turnaround sat at just under eight hours. As of this quarter, it's 3 hours and 42 minutes network-wide — and 91% of stat reads now land in the referring provider's inbox in under four hours. Here's how we got there, and what referring offices should expect going forward.
What changed
We rebuilt three pieces of the stat workflow:
1. Smart radiologist routing. Studies marked stat are now routed in real time to the next available sub-specialist with capacity, not just to whoever owns the worklist for that facility. With 60+ radiologists across our group, there's almost always a sub-specialist ready within minutes.
2. Faster image transfer. Every modality across the network now pushes images to a single cloud-based PACS within seconds of acquisition. The radiologist starts reading while the patient is still walking out of the scan room.
3. Closed-loop alerting. When a stat read is signed, the system notifies the referring office in three ways simultaneously: a portal alert, an EMR-integrated message (where available), and a direct phone call for critical findings. Nothing waits in a fax queue.
What "stat" means at Precise
Mark an order stat when the result will change management in the next 24 hours. Examples we see daily:
- Suspected acute stroke (CT head, CTA)
- Acute abdominal pain with concern for surgical pathology
- Spine trauma with neurologic symptoms
- Possible cord compression or cauda equina
- Pre-op clearance imaging needed same day
If you're unsure, just call our radiology coordinator line — we'd rather expedite a borderline case than slow one that needs to move.
Critical-finding callbacks
Every critical or significant unexpected finding gets a direct phone call from the radiologist to the ordering provider or designated covering clinician, in addition to the written report. The call is documented in the report under "Communication of Findings" with timestamp and recipient.
What this means for your office
You should plan to receive stat reads within 4 hours, 24 hours a day. If a stat report hasn't arrived in your portal within 4 hours, call us — it usually means a contact-info issue we can fix in seconds. Our turnaround dashboard is also visible inside the Provider Portal, broken down by modality and facility, so you can see live performance for the centers your patients use most.
Coming next
We're piloting a "pre-read" feature in Q3 that surfaces preliminary AI findings to the radiologist the moment a study is reconstructed. Early results show another 20–30 minutes shaved off stat reads on CT pulmonary embolism and CT head studies. We'll publish detailed results once the pilot wraps.