For the first time since announcing their worldwide cooperation agreement in the summer of 2009, partners GE Healthcare and InterComponentWare (CW) will present their integrated products in Europe at a joint booth at the World of Healthcare IT (WoHIT) in Barcelona.
The two companies cooperate in the development of standards-based networking solutions. “We are taking an important step towards establishing communications compatibility worldwide in the area of medical care. Together with GE Healthcare, this enables us to create new standard products for the eHealth market that are based on profiles defined by the initiative Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE). These will be able to connect between hospitals, convalescent and rehabilitation facilities, office-based physicians and others who provide medical or health services in regional, national and international projects,” says the CEO of ICW, Peter Kirschbauer.
IHE’s XDS profile is the foundation upon which the new products from ICW and GE Healthcare were built. This profile is already in use in many European countries, the US and Canada, as a baseline for the specification of eHealth projects.
At WoHIT, ICW and GE will present the centerpiece of their cooperative efforts. With a combination of eHealth master patient index, eHealth information exchange, eHealth clinical portal, and centricity enterprise archive, the two partners offer a complete solution to integrate regional and national-level projects that integrate both medical documentation and digital imagery. At the centre of interest is compatibility with IHE profiles (XDS, XDS-I, PIX/PDQ and ATNA), but also flexible connectivity with information systems in hospitals, radiological facilities and picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) that are not compatible with IHE profiles.
These solutions will ensure that medical information is comprehensively available wherever medical treatment is being given. They enable faster, better informed decision making, simplify processes, and lead to a high level of quality in medical care.
“This is our response to the biggest challenges confronting us in modern patient care. The primary goal of our eHealth strategy is to improve the quality and accessibility of health-related data while at the same time reducing costs,” states Jürgen Reyinger, GE Healthcare IT’s general manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).
Martin Fuchs, ICW general manager for EMEA, adds, “The solutions we developed together with GE Healthcare set completely new standards. Until now doctors working in different facilities haven’t been able to share medical information about their shared patients so completely or directly, and so to have use of it in support of timely diagnosis and treatment.”