Feeling Confident in American Health Imaging During COVID-19

May 20, 2020 – 3 min read

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Feel Confident in American Health Imaging During COVID-19

You’re playing football in the yard with your kids—as part of their homeschool physical education, of course—when you’re tackled by your son and fall to the ground. You get up and dust yourself off, but the damage is done: you’ve hurt your left knee.

The game is over, but the pain isn’t, and ice and elevation don’t help. Your knee is stiff, it’s starting to swell, and you’re having a hard time straightening it. You need medical attention.

While many physician practices and urgent care facilities have pivoted their practice models to provide consultations via telemedicine, that care can only go so far. In the case of orthopedic injuries, for example, your telemedicine doctor will ask about your symptoms and look at the swelling in your knee during a video call, but there’s a missing piece of the puzzle: an imaging study. An imaging study, such as an MRI or a CT, shows the doctor exactly what’s going on with the muscles, ligaments and bones inside your body—and helps the doctor better understand the extent of the injury and the treatment you’ll need to recover.

The telemedicine doctor will write the order for the imaging study, but what’s next? It feels risky right now to visit the local hospital’s imaging department for the test, and you might be tempted to postpone the test until the risk for COVID-19 exposure is lower. American Health Imaging wants you to know there is another, safer option.

Why AHI?

AHI’s freestanding outpatient imaging centers offer an alternative to hospital imaging departments. Our locations are fully accredited by the American College of Radiology and the Intersocietal Accreditation Commission—just like many hospitals—and test results are interpreted by board-certified radiologists. Our state-of-the-art equipment means that the quality of our imaging studies is just as good, and may even be better, than what you’ll find at the hospital, at a cost that is up to 75% less than hospitals. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve taken steps to make you feel better about your decision to visit AHI for your imaging studies. While we’ve always had rigorous protocols in place to clean and sanitize our equipment and facilities, we’ve taken these practices to another level by following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 cleaning and disinfectant recommendations. 

We’ve also implemented new policies and procedures to keep our patients and staff as safe as possible during this time. Currently, we provide the following: 

  • Curbside check-in from the car or our sanitized waiting rooms.
  • Extensive screening of all employees before they begin their shifts
  • Extensive screening of all patients before they enter the centers
  • Regular sterilization of commonly touched items, such as door handles, pens and clipboards
  • Social distancing practices in place in our waiting rooms
  • And, it many cases, a touchless concierge services patient experience

You can feel confident in your decision to choose AHI.

Don’t Delay

With fears about COVID-19 exposure running rampant, it might seem smart to postpone your imaging study—and in some cases, for low-risk screenings, that’s often true. However, delaying necessary diagnostic imaging, such as MRIs or CTs, can keep you from getting the treatment you need and may be detrimental for your health. Without treatment, some injuries will progress and cause debilitating damage. Other injuries, which may have received conservative treatment, could progress to the point they require surgery. Without imaging, you won’t know. 
 
There’s no need to wait to get the imaging you need. Request more information about your outpatient imaging options with American Health Imaging.