Harbor: Ortho Outpatient CT

• Oct 2025
  • *New* Ortho Pre-Ops CT’s can be scheduled outpatient, sometimes same-day!

Think back to a shift where you had a stable Ortho fracture patient sitting in X-Hall, let’s say they have complex distal radius fracture and there are a million trauma patients coming in non-stop, but Ortho really needs a wrist CT bc they are going to operate next week. Until now, we would have to hold that patient in their chair until they got said CT bc it would be a disaster for everyone if surgery had to be cancelled bc of no pre-op imaging.

Well now you don’t have to hold that patient in the ED for the CT! Now DHS patients who are getting surgery by our Ortho team can get urgent outpatient CT’s, sometimes the same day.

Example: your patient has a complex radius fracture. Reg confirms this is a DHS patient. Ortho tells you they are going to do surgery next week. They need an urgent CT prior to surgery.

Steps:

Ortho tells you "Hey, we need x CT”

Place routine CT order:

make sure it’s a Routine CT

click future within 1 day, and 2 day grace period (*see screenshot below)

Write “ED Ortho” in 'RELEVANT HISTORY’ field (*not comments -- this signals to schedulers to prioritize the scheduling)

The CT test is scheduled

If during daytime hours (7a-3p) you should get a TEAMS message from the CT schedules about the exact outpatient CT time and info on where the patient needs to go (rm 105)

If after 3pm – the patient will get a call from the CT schedulers the next business day between 8-8:30am for urgent scheduling

You can discharge the patient and that’s it

• If the CT schedulers have questions about the order, they have been instructed to call Ortho resident on-call (not the ED!)

Laminated instructions in every doc box.

Shoutout to Dr. Jen Roh and Nancy from the LEAN team for making this workflow possible.

Contact Dr. Roh for any questions or feedback.