March 30, 2017 — Visage Imaging Inc. announced that Mercy, the fifth largest Catholic health system in the United States, completed its enterprise-wide implementation of the Visage 7 Enterprise Imaging Platform in record time. Visage 7 enables enterprise imaging with fast, thin-client, server-side processing technology, as well as simple diagnostic mobile access via Visage Ease Pro.
Mercy began its five-phase series of go-lives beginning in September 2016, completing the process last week in the St. Louis metropolitan area.
Visage 7 is now live and serving as the primary diagnostic imaging platform across 50 Mercy imaging locations, including 43 community and specialty hospitals. Mercy spans four states, including Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma.
The platform is integrated with Mercy's electronic health record (EHR), existing vendor neutral archive (VNA) and enterprise workflow engine, completing a deconstructed PACS (picture archiving and communication system) strategy that provided Mercy the modular components needed to achieve quick wins in addressing failing legacy systems.
Mercy's sophistication and scale is indicative of the massive sizes of its VNA and EHR. Tight integration with both systems was key in Mercy's ability to leverage existing investments, with minimal disruption to clinicians.
The healthcare system has already begun to consolidate imaging workflows leveraging Visage's One Viewer philosophy, to include the elimination of dedicated breast imaging workstations, generating immediate return on investment (ROI), and further expanding Visage 7's reach into the imaging enterprise.
Mercy was named a 2016 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Davies Enterprise Award recipient for achieving improvements in patient care through the use of health information technology.
Furthermore, Mercy Technology Services (MTS) is planning on leveraging the knowledge and expertise gained during its own Visage implementation, to support its Epic Connect program, providing hosted image distribution and diagnostic solutions for its customers, nationwide.
"Mercy needed to quickly install Visage because we were operating nine separate imaging systems, and those systems were aging," explained Gil Hoffman, CIO, Mercy Technology Services. "Visage gave us the support we needed to speed things up, shave months off our plan and get a single, strategic imaging platform in place. Now, only six months later, our system architecture is simplified, and physicians across Mercy have faster, more reliable access to images."
Visage's architecture for Mercy processes 70,000 current and prior imaging exams daily, equating to over 25 million annual studies. Mercy has implemented Visage 7 in a centralized, high-availability architecture providing zero downtime. The platform has enabled the decommissioning of nine separate instances of Mercy's legacy PACS, simplifying and consolidating diagnostic, clinical and mobile image viewing with one Visage Backend Server and five Visage Render Servers (also replicated in a secondary data center for redundancy). Despite being centralized, Visage 7's server-side processing architecture provides 1-2 second display of any combination of imaging studies, regardless of size or modality type(s), even over broadband speed connections.
For more information: www.visageimaging.com
August 06, 2024 
