Orthopaedic patients routinely wait days for an MRI that takes minutes to perform. Two surgeons — one in trauma, one in sports medicine — describe what that delay costs, and what changes when soft-tissue imaging happens in the exam room during the first visit.
The delay is the diagnosis
A patient walks in with a knee that gave way. The examination narrows it to a handful of possibilities, and separating them takes soft-tissue imaging. In most practices that means a referral, a pre-authorisation, a scheduled appointment at an imaging centre, a read, and a second visit to discuss it. Fifteen days across three trips is not unusual.
None of that time is spent scanning. The scan itself is minutes. The rest is logistics — and the patient spends all of it in pain, and often out of work.
“Information you can gather in a timely fashion”
Dr David Helfet spent his career in orthopaedic trauma, where the gap between injury and answer is measured in hours rather than weeks. He puts the problem plainly:
“The most important thing to speed up the care and assure you make the right diagnosis, is the information that you can gather in a timely fashion at the point of care.”
Dr David Helfet
The phrase worth sitting with is at the point of care. Not faster imaging somewhere else — imaging in the room where the decision is being made, while the patient is still in front of you.
What sending a patient away costs
Dr Michael Terry frames the same problem from the other end: what the referral costs, and what becomes possible if it stops being necessary.
“This is going to change the game for us. If we don’t have to send somebody for a very expensive study that we have to wait a long time for, this could drive costs down, and if we can utilize it in a preventative way, that’s going to be a game changer.”
Dr Michael Terry
The last clause is the one that gets overlooked. When a scan is expensive and slow, it gets rationed — ordered only once a problem is bad enough to justify the trip. When it is neither, imaging can be used earlier, to check whether something is developing rather than to confirm that it already has.
What this changes in an orthopaedic clinic
- One visit instead of three. Examination, scan and treatment plan happen in the same appointment.
- Fewer patients lost between steps. Every handoff to an outside imaging centre is a place where people drop out of the pathway.
- Imaging you can afford to use early. At roughly $100 a scan with no capital purchase, the calculation about whether a scan is “worth it” changes.
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Investigational device. Agile is under development and has not been cleared or approved by the FDA or any regulatory authority. It is not available for sale and is limited to investigational use. Capabilities, specifications and economics shown are design goals and subject to change; clinical claims are not implied.