Many radiologists know vRad as a teleradiology practice, but what many may not realize is that it’s also a tech company. In fact, more than a third of our non-physician team members are on our technology teams. The benefits of technology and physicians under one roof are enormous—leading to better patient care, a better radiologist reading experience, and better service to our clients.
Since 2001, we’ve been working hard toward perfecting all three of those areas. I’ve been at vRad for more than 17 years and I now run the tech support team I’ve spent most of my career working in. Our primary goal is to keep our radiologists and client connections up and running. All radiologists depend on their technology to deliver patient care. Whether in-person or remote, a radiologist’s reading platform is everything. What happens if it crashes every few months? … Or worse, days?
What damage is done by the time you’re back up and reading again?
More uptime
Every moment of downtime heavily impacts you, your patients, and maybe your paycheck. From its founding, vRad’s leadership team realized that we had to prove we were as dependable as on-site providers because we were pioneering teleradiology. We couldn’t outsource designing and building our technology—we had to build our platform from scratch to meet teleradiology’s unique needs and vRad’s high expectations.
Our goal is 99.9% uptime, and we almost always exceed that. In emergency radiology, especially critical cases like stroke and trauma, tiny percentages—often translating into minutes—really matter. When you’re a radiologist who depends on your reading platform functioning to support your family, that matters too. And we’re there to support that.
How do we keep our platform so stable? We have a full engineering team that works closely with our Tier 2 support teams, constantly updating, enhancing, and optimizing. Always with input from our own radiologists and medical leadership team. If there are problems with the platform, there’s no waiting for a third party for a solution. We get it done. We maintain our SOC 2 Type 2 certification and navigate the intricacies of FDA clearance. Our full suite of knowledgeable tech support team members and engineers manage all of this with three primary aims—keep our radiologists reading, studies flowing, and patients cared for. During the pandemic, it was interesting to watch as many radiology practices waded into the remote world for the very first time and discovered problems we’d already solved, literally years before.
Faster than CrowdStrike
Like many businesses and organizations throughout the world, our support capabilities were tested with the CrowdStrike error in July 2024, that grounded planes and halted business around the world. It got us too.
But only for two hours.
Two hours is a long time in an emergency room—but as tech support for a medical practice, those are our stakes every single day. When our servers started to go down, we had to troubleshoot fast. But because we maintain our own servers, IT department, and manage our own platform, we can find and fix problems faster than any third party. Within minutes our engineering team had isolated the program CrowdStrike as the issue, and we immediately began disabling it on our servers. Then we needed to quickly get support to our more than 100 radiologists actively reading remotely on the platform. Working in conjunction with our parent practice, Radiology Partners, we rolled out our fix before CrowdStrike released theirs.
Two hours after the first server went down, we were sending and receiving images again. That’s what’s possible with a skilled, in-house support team working on a custom-built platform. It’s a level of technical expertise few medical practices ever get to experience.
Radiologist support that never sleeps
Our support techs sleep, but the support department never does—it’s up and running 24/7/365. As fantastic as the vRad platform is—and it truly is—nothing goes smoothly 100% of the time, and unexpected issues happen. So, let’s say it’s three in the morning and one of our radiologists is having a problem. Who do they get when they call up vRad? They’re going to reach, at minimum, a Tier 2 tech, trained and employed by vRad, who knows the platform inside and out, and can escalate the case if needed.
Actually, one of our goals is that they don’t have to make that call. Our radiologists have direct access to the support team via live chat and are encouraged to check in about anything. That way, we can often start solving problems at the first sign of trouble and prevent the issue from snowballing into a problem that completely stops them in their tracks.
We generally catch issues so early that it’s easy to walk the radiologist through a quick solution. But maybe it’s more complex. No problem—our techs have the ability to remote into the radiologists workstation and fix the problem themselves and get our radiologists back to reading as soon as possible.
We also work on heading off problems before they start. Headset suddenly breaks? No worries, we sent you two when you started. And tomorrow, we’re going to mail you another one, so you have a back-up again. Workstation computer is due for a system update? We’ll let you know, so you can plan for it—not get stalled in the middle of your shift.
In terms of the platform, we really have our fingers right on the pulse, since it’s homegrown. If we see that one aspect of it isn’t performing optimally, we get alerts, and we can put out fires before they actually become fires.
Training from the pros
Want to know one of the best ways to stop tech problems before they start at a remote radiology practice? Have the experts train the radiologists.
If someone has ever mailed you a workstation with nothing but an instruction manual, trust me, you’re in for a much better experience here. Workstation set-up and technical training are a foundation for all our radiologists. We don’t just dump a bunch of unfamiliar tech on them and expect them to figure it out. We walk them through the whole process, train them on the functionality of the platform, and make sure they know how to use the features our radiologists depend on the most. (We know what they are, because our radiologists have told us!) All of that is in addition to pairing them with another vRad radiologist for mentoring for the first several months.
This kind of higher-level, comprehensive training ensures that our radiologists understand how the platform was designed to work for them. But also, so they know how much flexibility and customizability is built in. Ultimately, the goal of the platform is to let every radiologist give the best possible read to every single study. What that looks like in practice is going to be different for every radiologist, and higher quality training means more personal utilization of the platform.
Teleradiology done better
vRad’s custom-built platform—and the support that comes with it—is a big reason many radiologists join us, and it’s a huge reason why they stay. It enables them to do their best work, supported by an exceptional support team. From a stable platform and fully integrated tools to the real people behind the computers on our support team, every piece of our technology is focused on a better radiologist experience, so they can give better patient care. And I’m proud to be a part of it.
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