ECM: Bringing Patient Information Together

DICOM, Patient Information Management and Distribution Challenges Facing Providers

For multi-hospital systems and large hospitals with multiple imaging departments, there are multiple options and challenges for departmental applications’ integration, management and distribution of patient information.  Departmental approaches for content management and distribution have led to redundant clinical image storage (management) and visualization (viewing) applications.  These redundancies create substantial financial, operational and clinical challenges for providers:

• Financial inefficiencies and cost overruns result from multiple applications, databases and hardware sub-components, which must be purchased, managed, updated, integrated and backed-up over the useful life of the patient record.
• Operational inefficiencies result from duplicate IT resources that must manage, update, integrate and back-up multiple systems.
• Clinical inefficiencies result from multiple web applications and user interfaces (radiology, cardiology, pathology, etc.) that clinicians must learn and use to assess a patient’s information to make medical / surgical care decisions.

Our Product Design and Ease of Integration Address the Challenges

Since its inception, Emageon has maintained strict adherence to standards such as DICOM, HL7 and IHE in order to improve its content management and workflow applications.  Strict adherence to standards and enterprise class performance characteristics allow our customers to effectively and efficiently deal with these challenges.  Emageon ECM is a single, enterprise-centric application that easily integrates in an open-systems framework with departmental diagnostic applications such as radiology, cardiology and pathology PACS and consolidates imaging information over its life cycle.  This allows IT departments to introduce a content management platform that departmental PACS can leverage for financial, operational and clinical efficiencies.

• Financial efficiencies result from implementing a single, enterprise capable content management application that quickly and easily integrates with departmental clinical imaging PACS and manages patient information over its life cycle.
• Operational efficiencies result from a single instance of implementing new releases and performing integrations and data back-ups for content management across multiple sites and departments.
• Clinical efficiencies result from one visualization application for clinicians to learn and use for accessing clinical imaging data—whether originating from radiology, cardiology, pathology or other image-intensive specialties.  This ensures more complete point-of-care patient information and less time searching through multiple applications for needed information.

We Have Proven Success with Large-scale Provider Implementations

Emageon ECM is one of the most widely-deployed enterprise clinical image management applications among major hospitals and hospital systems in the United States.  Measured in terms of what is important in healthcare technology decisions—performance, speed and interoperability—Emageon has been tested and proven successful in each of these critical categories.

• Emageon ECM has been tested and benchmarked by customers as a market leader in scalability in supporting multiple departments and image types.
• Emageon ECM has been tested and benchmarked by customers as a market leader in supporting multiple transactions or associations resulting from large enterprise scale deployments.
• Emageon has been validated and benchmarked by customers as a market leader as it relates to support for DICOM / IHE and HL7.

Compliance to Standards and Complete Vendor Neutrality

Emageon’s ECM is built firmly on industry standards (DICOM and HL7).  We adhere strongly to the IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) framework and protocols.  These foundational characteristics create tremendous efficiencies and a trusted platform to consolidate departmental PACS applications.

ECM includes auto-routing and prefetching capabilities that incorporate enterprise workflow across multiple departmental systems, allowing clinicians to better organize, assign work and manage patient information across disparate systems.  We employ a distributed architecture that incorporates the use of local ‘‘caches’’ at remote sites.  Each remote cache provides a single view of images throughout the enterprise, no matter where the image was originally generated or is managed.  This lessens the real time dependence on the WAN and allows for continuous operation of the remote sites if the WAN is inoperable.

Summary

The benefits of Emageon’s ECM:

• Supports the patient DICOM record across multiple clinical imaging departments (radiology, cardiology, pathology, etc.) to enable true enterprise clinical image content management.
• Supports advanced open-systems architectures, including application level replication and ILM (Information Lifecycle Management) in order to ensure optimal performance.
• Supports vendor neutrality and has proven compatibility with major radiology and cardiology PACS vendors.
• Provides the reporting tools to substantiate and monitor return on investment.