August 14, 2015 — GE Healthcare announced that it will provide picture archiving and communication system (PACS) and vendor neutral archiving systems for Adventist Health, a health delivery system serving more than 70 communities in California, Hawaii, Oregon and Washington. As part of the five-year agreement, Adventist Health will utilize one enterprise-wide system, using Centricity Solutions for Enterprise Imaging in 18 of its community hospitals.
Following a medical scan, the time it takes for a patient’s medical images to be shared with his or her doctor and receive a diagnosis can vary from one hour to a few weeks. In today’s digital world, where people can share images with the touch of a button, healthcare organizations seek a more seamless workflow for image sharing and collaboration.
“It’s exciting to be laying a new foundation of infrastructure that will allow Adventist Health to eventually share all types of images seamlessly across the organization,” said Sheila Henriques, executive director of clinical IT projects with Adventist Health. “With our patient records increasingly comprised of more and more images, accessibility by providers, both internal and external to Adventist Health, is essential. Images play a vital role in the patient’s medical journey, and it’s exciting to take this next step in enhancing care for our patients.”
Using this new system, Adventist Health clinicians will be able to store and view patients’ images on a common core platform, allowing for easy accessibility to a unified patient record and facilitating near real-time collaboration among the care teams. By consolidating disparate systems and centralizing access, Adventist Health can not only benefit from economies of scale, but also provide its clinicians easier access to patient history and reports when needed.
The new IT systems that Adventist Health will utilize are part of GE Healthcare’s broader software upgrade. With the new version of Centricity Solutions for Enterprise Imaging, health organizations will now have the ability for more collaboration and more informed diagnosis with a common viewing system and an open vendor-neutral archiving platform across different specialties. Healthcare professionals can also receive and view images from patients’ records on their mobile devices.
Adventist Health will begin installing GE Healthcare imaging and archiving solutions later this year.
For more information: www.gehealthcare.com