Why turnaround time is the real teleradiology metric

Turnaround time gets treated as a nice-to-have in a lot of teleradiology conversations — something to mention after image quality and radiologist credentials. In practice, for most diagnostic centres, it's the number that actually determines whether teleradiology works for your workflow or quietly becomes a bottleneck.

Where the time actually goes

A slow report rarely comes from a slow radiologist. It comes from everything around the reading: a study sitting in an upload queue, a worklist that isn't shared cleanly across sites, a manual step to route the right study to the right reader. Each of those adds minutes that compound across a day's volume.

• Upload and transfer time from modality to worklist
• Time sitting unassigned before a radiologist picks it up
• Reporting time itself
• Sign-off and delivery back to the referring centre

Why the platform matters as much as the panel

A reputed radiologist panel reading on a slow or unreliable platform still produces slow turnaround — the bottleneck just moves earlier in the pipeline. That's a large part of why we run our own reporting service on our own software rather than a third-party platform: when the worklist, routing, and delivery are all ours, there's no vendor relationship standing between a technical fix and it actually shipping.

What to ask a teleradiology provider

• What's the average time from study upload to signed report — not best case, average?
• Who fixes it when something in the pipeline breaks — the reporting provider, or a separate software vendor they depend on?
• Can you retrieve your own archived studies without raising a request?

If you want the specifics for your own study volume, our Cloud Teleradiology Services page has the current rate card, or you can get in touch directly.