When a patient in Altoona, Pa., needs an emergency brain scan in the middle of the night, a doctor in Bangalore, India, is asked to interpret the results.

Spurred by a shortage of U.S. radiologists and an exploding demand for more sophisticated scans to diagnose scores of ailments, doctors at Altoona Hospital and dozens of other American hospitals are finding that offshore outsourcing works even in medicine.

Over the past few years, the number of nighttime emergency cases was swamping Altoona’s seven radiologists.

“All of a sudden somebody was waking up all night to cover all this extra work,” said radiologist Dr. Richard Wertz. And while that doctor was groggy, “we didn’t have the luxury of that guy taking the next day off.”

Using radiologists halfway around the world, where it’s daytime, “solves that problem for us,” Wertz said.

It’s part of the growing telemedicine trend, with technology enabling the speedy transfer of medical data over the Internet to virtually anywhere there’s a compatible computer. That means radiologists in Australia, India, Israel and Lebanon are reading scans on U.S. patients. Most are designed to take advantage of the time difference.

Despite fears from some doctors, advocates insist offshore radiology is nothing like the nightmarish vision of seedy sweatshops stealing U.S. jobs and replacing them with unqualified cheap labor. Most of the doctors are U.S.-trained and licensed — although there is at least one experiment using radiologists without U.S. training.

More typical is the Altoona scenario, which involves doctors like Dr. Arjun Kalyanpur. A U.S.-licensed and credentialed radiologist, he got his postgraduate training at Yale University and runs a respected two-man service from Bangalore, India, called Teleradiology Solutions.

Also a Yale faculty member, Kalyanpur earns the equivalent of a U.S. radiologist. His equally credentialed radiology partner also trained in the United States.

About 40 U.S. hospitals, including Altoona, use Kalyanpur’s company.

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