Photo By Tech. Sgt. James Hodgman | Senior Airman Wesley Hong, 60th Medical Diagnostics and Therapeutics Squadron picture...... read more read more
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Four Airmen inside David Grant USAF Medical Center at Travis Air Force Base, California, operate the largest teleradiology services department in the Air Force.
One of those individuals is Senior Airman Wesley Hong, 60th Diagnostics and Therapeutics Squadron picture archiving computer system administrator from Detroit, Michigan.
Hong is responsible for ensuring network connectivity for DGMC and for maintaining $42 million in critical communications equipment. He also managed DGMC’s PACS department for five months during a 50 percent manning shortage.
“Airman Hong is one of those workhorses that every organization needs,” said Senior Master Sgt. Kyle Scafidi, 60th MDTS superintendent of diagnostics imaging. “Usually two staff sergeants run that section and Airman Hong ran that department for five months with zero interruptions in services. That’s pretty substantial and kind of unheard of. For a senior airman to sustain this type of operation is impressive.”
Hong’s expertise is critical to the success of the 60th MDTS, Scafidi said.
“He keeps the infrastructure going for our local mission and for two areas of responsibility that we support with our teleradiology services. We support 18 military treatment facilities because of his hard work.”
Diagnostics imaging allows doctors to look inside a person’s body to search for clues about a medical conditions. It encompasses a variety of imaging including X-rays, ultrasound, mammography, nuclear medicine, computed tomography and MRI scans.
Hong said he understands the importance of his job.
“Hospitals can be very fast paced and sometimes mistakes get made,” Hong said. “When that happens, we come in to fix it and ensure everything that’s in the patient’s record is correct.”
“Sometimes images get flipped around or may even wind up in the wrong person’s file,” Hong said. “I make sure I contact the right people and ensure the correct imagery is in the correct file.”
Hong and his team review more than 110,000 images obtained from within DGMC every year and approximately 25,000 diagnostic images annually from military medical facilities who don’t have local radiologist support.
Hong also helps ensure DGMC can communicate with other bases so the medical center can send and receive vital medical information.
“I monitor the systems to ensure the images are properly coming to us from other sites and I ensure our radiologists have the information needed to create the patients’ health report and the report gets to the corresponding base,” Hong said.
Troubleshooting is the best part of the job, Hong added.
“It’s always a different issue, sometimes it can take me five minutes to fix, other times it takes me days, but you really learn the components of your servers, the software and the program you’re using,” Hong said.
One day the system crashed and the PACS department was unable to send or receive any images.
“We couldn’t receive any images from any of the 18 sites we support and the system was down for about three days,” Hong said. “It was essentially a total system failure. We had to login to all our servers to see if they were working properly.”
“We called each site and requested they mail us their imagery on discs, that was our temporary fix,” Hong said.
During the communication outage, the PACS office received hundreds of CDs including a few from Fairchild Air Force Base, Washington and Dover Air Force Base, Delaware.
“We had to manually enter the information and ensure the correct data was there including the images, patient history, names, everything,” Hong said.
Lt. Col. Ely Wolin, 60th MDTS Chief of Nuclear Medicine, had high praise for Hong.
“Senior Airman Hong has been a tremendous asset to our department,” Wolin said. “He epitomizes a "can do" attitude. There has not been one time that he either couldn't help me with a problem or took the time to investigate and direct me to the appropriate resources.”
“The nature of our business and network connections leads to a big demand on our PACS office, which is compounded by the fact that our facility performs teleradiology coverage for over a dozen Air Force bases,” Wolin added. “In order for us to interpret any study, it needs to be in the system properly and able to connect to our dictation system and medical information system. Just this morning a study was loaded in the system incorrectly - Hong fixed this within 30-seconds.”
Hong said he enjoys being a part of such a great team.
| Date Taken: | 06.02.2016 |
| Date Posted: | 06.17.2016 16:23 |
| Story ID: | 201615 |
| Location: | TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, CA, US |
| Web Views: | 42 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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