Total Health Systems | August 2, 2013 (updated December 18, 2018)

Total Health System Explains Digital X-Rays – Macomb County, Michigan

Hi, my name’s Dr. Bill Pohlen and I’m an associate doctor here a Total Health Systems. Quite often when we’re in a patient consultation, a patient will ask us, why we need to take x-rays. Well, first of all, a digital x ray, to us, is a diagnostic tool we use to determine what kind of care we’re going to provide for that patient. So, it’s just one of the tools that we use to help determine the care for that patient.

Now here at Total Health Systems, we use digital x ray. Some differences between analog x-ray and digital x ray, are number one, the most important thing is less radiation to the patient. This produces a higher quality film for us, but it also reduces the amount of retakes that might be needed. The other thing is no developing of the x-ray which eliminates the harsh chemicals we had to use in the past which also eliminates the possibility of an x-ray not coming out the way we wanted it to; it also reduces the cost of an x-ray. The x-ray, when we shoot film, it comes up on our computer screen in the other room in here. And it allows us to instantly see the x-ray, making sure that we have a good quality x-ray to proceed with easy storage of those X-rays.

In the past X-rays were on a film, which we had to have a large room to store all the films. X-rays usually are stored maybe 7 to 10 years, so you can just imagine how many x-rays would be stored in a room over a long period of time such as that. With this it’s all stored on a computer hard drive which allows us easy access, and gives us the ability if we need to send out x-rays to be read by a radiologist, we can email that file out to the radiologist, providing us with a report later on that afternoon or the next day. It just gives us ease of use. Copying the x-rays for patients, a lot of times patient needs to take the convenience of copying x-ray’s is important also. All we have to do is pop a CD into the computer and copy those films for the patient. They can take them for their own personal use, or they can take them off to another provider for them to, to view as well.

If a patient has other studies that they want to bring in such as a CT scan or an MRI, we could take those and put them into the files with the patient’s other x-ray’s so we have them for utilization later at a later date for examining as well.

My name is Dr. Bill Pohlen and I am with Total Health Systems. I’m an associate doctor here. Thank you for your time. If you have any other questions about x-rays for our office, please give us a call.