In conversation with Dr Gaurav S Mutha (MD, DNB, MNAMS), a chest-and-cancer imaging and intervention specialist, owner and chief consultant radiologist at Lifecare Diagnostics at Nagpur (Centre of excellence for chest & onco imaging & interventions) and the director and co-founder of Tesla Teleradiology , with 10+ years of experience in the field- on their success so far and Nandico’s presence in their journey…
Tesla Teleradiology, established in 2022, today has grown volumes in just a year, catering to 70+ centres, 75+ radiologists, with an average daily throughput of 500+ reports. Nandico’s business development team interviewed Dr Gaurav (co-founder) and obtained critical insights on their journey so far…
“Nandico has been with us right from the beginning, and they have always kept their ears open to any feedback that we have for them, helping both of us to grow together” quotes Dr Gaurav, reminiscing Tesla Telerad’s journey from inception. He mentions that cloud-based PACS softwares are faster than desktop-based versions, provide a reporting feature inbuilt (which prevents switching tabs) and provide the same feel as if working on a local console. There are a few practical difficulties, which have been resolved by being in constant-touch with Nandico’s customer-success and technical team.
Talking about the previous DICOM viewer experiences, Dr Gaurav mentions that he has used almost all the popular DICOM viewers, from Meddiff, Medsynaptic, Stradus, RadiAnt- and each have their own share of difficulties. What distinguishes Nandico is your willingness to listen to feedback, which a lot of legacy-solutions lack, he adds. On why he chose Nandico over other competitors Dr Gaurav cites two reasons which swung the pendulum in our favour- cost-effectiveness (for teleradiology PACS) and growth aspirations (both being young companies had the same desire to disrupt and innovate).
“It was serendipity that a message was circulated about Nandico’s offering on a WhatsApp group just when we were in our discussion stage at Tesla Telerad. Even a week’s mismatch- and we would have gone with a different player. However, we are really happy we went ahead with Nandico and have never re-thought our decision”
Nandico’s DICOM viewer has gone through multiple phases right from birth till today, and we have seen it grow to offer the robust features that it offers now. From a time when 2D MPR faced significant lags, to today when it is the fastest-loading – is a comment made by Dr Gaurav as he talks about Nandico’s intuitive, and comprehensive, yet user-friendly interface and DICOM viewer. He is especially appreciative of Nandico’s annotate feature, which allows radiologists to make observations on the image itself, and automatically prints it in the report, by default. So useful and distinctive is this feature, that Tesla Telerad leverages it as a marketing tool while pitching to their leads.
He further mentions that Tesla Telerad has already created a system in place to handle specific cases which require using advanced features (currently not offered by Nandico, like 3D MPR and volume rendering)- but they are required very rarely. Finally, as a radiologist, he himself prefers using speech-to-text AI tools for dictating reports, and looks forward to an integration of these tools in Nandico’s viewer.
“We have been referring Nandico’s other solutions- those of complete digital sharing to our radiologists and many of them have switched over. We do this mainly because of your customer-success team, which is willing to sort out problems and glitches even late at night”
Dr Gaurav mentions his reservations with regards to reporting on his mobile- he believes that it is great for preliminary viewing and provisional/stopgap diagnosis, however, one needs to cast the images on a big screen for analysing them properly and getting the final diagnosis. He prefers to use Augnito’s speech-to-text over laptop after having a detailed look at all the images on Nandico’s DICOM viewer.
On being asked about the future of teleradiology as a sector, Dr Gaurav confidently mentions that the future is bright with a potential for ample disruption. Having served as a centre owner employing teleradiology companies to actually being the co-founder of a teleradiology company, he is aware of the loopholes in the system. “Providing good compensation for radiologists and delivering good-quality and cost-effective reports to client centres are key to creating a healthy ecosystem viable for all stakeholders to thrive” is how he likes to state the future in one line, as we conclude the interview.
Stay connected for more such interviews as we uncover a fascinating story every time!