At this year’s Arab Health, GE Healthcare’s Integrated IT Solutions (IITS) business showcased its Centricity Information System suite designed to manage effective clinical and administrative workflow throughout the healthcare enterprise.
The need for enterprise-wide IT solutions is playing a crucial role in the growing and fast developing healthcare markets of the Middle East region. With digital data management, costs are kept under control, increasing both productivity and efficiency while at the same time promoting patient safety.
GE Healthcare’s Centricity Enterprise solution is an ideal choice for managing patient clinical care across the continuum of care while supporting medical education and clinical research. Today, this enterprise-wide solution is up and running in facilities in Qatar and Kuwait, driving the development of healthcare informatics, individualistic personal health and genomic research.
“We deliver tools with clinical depth. That is the reason why more than 40 hospitals in the Middle East region have chosen our Centricity solutions,” said Juergen Reyinger, General Manager, IITS Europe, Middle East & Africa at GE Healthcare. An example of a successful Centricity solutions implementation is at the National Guard Health Affairs (NGHA) authority in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. During the last decade the authority realized that conventional patient administration systems would be insufficient in managing the medical information of its population. The fully integrated Centricity product suite was recently implemented, comprising of both, Radiology Information System (RIS), Picture Archiving & Communication System (PACS) and Clinical Information Systems (CIS).
In commenting on their recent go-live of the Centricity Enterprise solution, Dr Majid M Al-Tuwaijri, Chairman of the NGHA’s Steering Committee explained, “The new solution supports a so far unmatched level of information fluency and promotes communication among our care teams, departments and facilities. Thanks to seamless connectivity across hospital departments we are experiencing higher efficiency and a streamlined paper-light work environment. From administration to clinical workflow, billing and revenue phase, all our users are now experiencing comprehensive information management capabilities.”
Visitors at Arab Health 2008 saw how this successful Centricity RIS/PACS solution meets the challenges of time pressure and complexities in medical imaging, based on progressive 3D tools. Enormous amounts of data within seconds can be reviewed, enlarged or reconstructed three dimensionally, easing and improving diagnoses of colonography, vessel analysis, CAD and much more.
With the latest version of Centricity Anesthesia, GE Healthcare introduced one of the most currently advanced systems for anesthesia documentation. The Clinical Information System is specifically tailored to the needs in the operating room. Easy touch screen functionality and contemporary display design make the system a user-friendly solution during the technical observation of all work steps in anesthesia.
Cardiologists have also started to follow the digitization trend. The fact that heart disease is one of the major causes of death worldwide contributes significantly to the need for automated and fast processes in cardiology. The Centricity Cardiovascular Information System delivers the clinical tools to shape a digital environment in a cathlab, echo lab or when consulting CT, MR and PET/CT datasets.
“Our solutions are fast, efficient and offer the clinical depth to convert pure data into pivotal information,” explained Reyinger. “The strong system performance in radiology, cardiology, anesthesia and elsewhere throughout the healthcare organization proves that Centricity is set for the future and can be further developed and used in multiple functions. At the same time we never lose sight of the real goal, the benefit for doctors and patients alike,” Reyinger concluded.