One of the Northeast’s major teaching hospitals is an international leader in virtually every area of medicine. It has been the site of pioneering breakthroughs that have improved lives and advanced healthcare around the world. This hospital includes more than 100 outpatient practices with more than 1,000 physicians serving patients from New England, across the United States, and from more than 100 countries around the world.
The teaching hospital’s radiology practice is vast as well, providing more than 800,000 imaging exams each year. Their archive holds an additional 10 million exams dating back to 1998. With so many exams, there is a great need for physicians and clinicians across the enterprise to access images efficiently and to effectively expedite care.
The enterprise imaging team wanted to provide better interoperability and access to images via their EPIC EHR. They also needed to reduce the heavier IT infrastructure required by their current image viewer. Their goal was to deploy a single viewer that would provide access to both online and archived image exams to their myriad entities, and do so in real time with no delays. Additionally, they wanted a way to stream the data from any of the systems in their network, leaving the patient data in place, rather than moving the data to a central single archive. The reason for leaving the data in place was that moving it was known to cause delays and synchronization errors.
Providers needed a better method of viewing patient image data, and the enterprise needed a new image viewer. They chose GE Healthcare’s Centricity Universal Viewer Zero Footprint (ZFP) as an enabling tool for images to be accessed directly from their EHR and throughout their enterprise. And because the viewer is ‘zero footprint,’ which means no code download, local installation or provisioning support is required, the teaching hospital has been able to provide access to a wider variety of users, currently totalling 8,800. ZFP facilitates better access to patients’ image history for more clinical staff by enabling any clinician with proper privileges to open any archive. With this solution in place, individual provisioning—with its inherent inefficiencies, slow-downs and complications—becomes a thing of the past.
July 25, 2024 
