Recently, at the annual meeting of the Healthcare Information & Management Systems Society (HIMSS), GE Healthcare presented Centricity Enterprise Archive as a platform for application-neutral image management. The standards-based archive helps manage patient and image data over time and image-enable electronic medical records (EMR).

Centricity Enterprise Archive expands beyond traditional imaging departments, such as radiology and cardiology, to provide a centralized, scalable archive for DICOM objects using DICOM standards for multiple departments or multiple vendor applications. The platform is poised to manage visible light images or other DICOM objects from imaging-intensive modalities such as endoscopy, ophthalmology, dermatology, and oncology. By leveraging both healthcare information exchange (HIE) and information technology standards and protocols, such as IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) and HL7, Centricity Enterprise Archive seeks to optimize image and patient data management regardless of specific clinical solution or image source.

This end result is an application-neutral, multi-departmental imaging repository that enables an enterprise to create a longitudinal, single patient jacket for users across a region that includes multiple hospitals and imaging centers. While each facility or department maintains its autonomous clinical workflow, it opens the door to provide caregivers a single point of access to imaging data throughout the interconnected enterprise. This approach is complementary to the implementation of an image-enabled EMR.
"The industry is trending toward consolidated IT infrastructure that reduces capital expenditures and enables the flow of information throughout the enterprise, regardless of the data origin," said Don Woodlock, Vice President and Global General Manager, GE Healthcare IT Imaging Solutions. "Centricity Enterprise Archive represents this new era in patient data management by embodying standards-based data management intended to maximize clinical workflow by enabling access to patient images and information through the EMR."
By adding the functionality of an integrated web-based enterprise viewer, Centricity Enterprise Archive provides clinicians and referring physicians with a fast clinical viewer from the EMR. The result is the potential for patient information at the point-of-care, or wherever it is needed throughout the enterprise, for a clinician to more-confidently make critical diagnostic decisions.

Centricity Enterprise Archive is currently being implemented as the Digital Imaging Repository (DI-r) for hospitals and medical centers across Southwestern Ontario (SWO), Canada, as part of the eHealth Ontario initiative to create a pan-Province and, eventually, pan-Canadian Electronic Health Record.

For more information about GE Healthcare, visit www.gehealthcare.com.

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