The term ‘eHealth’ is used everywhere today. However, a generic definition of this phrase is missing. GE Healthcare refers to eHealth as the total healthcare IT infrastructure that connects and adds value to the healthcare delivery system across multiple hospitals or a region, including physicians, care providers, patients and others.
At Medica 2009 GE Healthcare presents its eHealth solution to fundamentally enable digital networks: the Centricity Imaging Portal. This solution can retrieve historical patient data from different systems throughout a hospital, such as HIS, RIS and PACS. Radiologists can diagnose and report independently from location, time and institution. The technology is based on the international Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) profile Cross Enterprise Document Sharing (XDS) and uses DICOM and HL7 standards. Centricity Imaging Portal is easy to install, scalable, web-based and allows complex workflows and access rights in cross-hospital and regional clinical data and image exchange projects to be managed.
GE Healthcare and InterComponentWare (ICW) on target for eHealth
In order to further promote the exchange of clinical expertise beyond imaging solutions, GE Healthcare is delivering global solutions enabled by ehealth technology partner ICW headquartered in Walldorf, Germany. This collaboration drives eHealth solutions such as virtual and personal patient health records, and master patient index, in order to match clinical information to the right patient, as well as care and disease management IT solutions. The combination of these solutions can help to optimize workflows across vendors, care providers and institutions, and supports safer diagnoses and better patient care. The result is expected to reduce costs and enhance productivity for all parties.
“The partnership with GE Healthcare is one of the past year’s most important milestones in the further development of our solutions,” said Dr Lutz Kleinholz, ICW chairman. The key project is an application helping to centrally manage and distribute medical documents, by which experts from different institutions get access to shared patient data.
On the occasion of Medica, for the first time GE Healthcare and ICW officially act as partners, and will showcase information regarding their collaborative solutions in all mutual exhibit locations.
Continuous innovation in imaging solutions
Next to the focus on eHealth solutions GE Healthcare is actively driving its imaging solutions portfolio to the next level. At Medica the company presents latest digital IT solutions for mammography and cardiology that meet the challenges in modern healthcare environments.
“Our Centricity RIS/PACS is web-based and offers an extremely fast streaming technology which enables the system to run in region-wide and multi-hospital environments even under low bandwidth conditions. Its full XDS capabilities offer the radiologist to access information from multiple systems even beyond radiology on a single desktop,” said Jürgen Reyinger, vice president and general manager at GE Healthcare IT for Europe, Middle East and Africa.
On top of its embedded Maximum Intensity Projection Module/Multiple Planar Reconstruction (MIP/MPR) functionality Centricity RIS/PACS provides advanced clinical tools and 3D technology in order to easily evaluate huge sets of data. “This supports cost-effective image exchange projects throughout several care providers and vendors. At the same time, fast access to vital patient information is leading to more timely and safe diagnoses for patients,” Reyinger emphasized.
GE Healthcare’s long-lasting experience in medical devices and IT has led to a series of new technologies, driving the commitment to interoperability further. At this year’s Medica visitors can learn more about a remote viewing and image sharing workstation (AW-Server) while all processing is done on a web-based server. Office PCs virtually turn into a multi-modality 2D, 3D and 4D postprocessing workstation. The efficient combination of AW-Server with Centricity RIS and PACS promotes extensive reporting capabilities, streamlined radiology workflows and a smooth collaboration between internal clinicians and referring physicians, enabling safe diagnoses and thus better patient care.