Boston Medical Center
Boston, MA
A private, not-for-profit, 626-bed, academic medical center, Boston Medical Center (BMC) is a 24-hour Level I trauma center handling close to 30,000 inpatient discharges annually. BMC implemented GE Healthcare's eHealth Information Exchange (eHIE) and is collaborating with 15 neighborhood health centers through their CIE (Community Information Exchange) to create a patient centric care model, sharing medications, problems, allergies and lab results. Joel Vengo, chief applications officer at BMC provides insight to their model.
Butler Health System
Western Pennsylvania
Press Release
Butler Health System (BHS) is implementing GE Healthcare's Health Information Exchange (HIE) to enable clinical information access between BHS and its affiliated and independent physicians, as well as with referral hospitals outside of the immediate community. "We've partnered with GE to create an extensible health information exchange that we will use to better communicate and coordinate care with physicians across our community" said Chuck Oleson, chief information officer of Butler Health System. "We chose GE's solution because it has a robust infrastructure to meet our immediate requirements, and is standards-based, allowing us to connect to other HIEs as they develop over time." Butler Health System serves over 120,000 patients annually in the Western Pennsylvania communities and has more than a dozen outpatient locations throughout Butler County. BHS is implementing GE's HIE to enable the seamless exchange of information including: continuity of care documents (CCDs); clinical summary documents; surgical and practice notes; lab, radiology and cardiology orders and results; and referrals. Oleson explained, "Creating bi-directional data exchange will give doctors access to comprehensive patient data, helping them provide the best possible care."
eLINCx
Ohio communities
Press Release
eLINCx will implement GE Healthcare's eHealth Information Exchange (HIE) across Wooster Community Hospital, Dunlap Community Hospital and more than a dozen physician practices. eLINCx provides quality healthcare services to central Ohio communities. "GE worked closely with us from the start to understand our current and future needs," explained Carla Fonte, Chief Information Officer of Wooster Community Hospital and Chairman of the eLINCx Board. "GE's eHealth team helped us to translate our goals into an implementation road map that will drive short term success for eLINCx and the community. By sharing health information, laboratory results and radiology reports, our clinicians will be able to make more informed decisions at the point of care and improve patient outcomes, which is our top priority."
Erlanger Health System
Tennessee
Press Release
Erlanger has announced the planned implementation of a regional health information exchange (HIE) to facilitate the seamless and secure flow of patient information among Erlanger's four hospitals and 13 outpatient facilities in the wider Chattanooga, TN region, encompassing southeast Tennessee, north Georgia, north Alabama and western North Carolina. "We see a tremendous need for streamlined connectivity among our Emergency Departments (EDs), inpatient and ambulatory facilities," says Laurene Vamprine, Erlanger's Chief Information Officer (CIO). "We turned to GE because we felt their solution will help provide clinicians with relevant, select clinical information from across our various locations and heterogeneous IT systems. Additionally, it will present the information in a more useful format than the point-to-point approach we have today." Each year, Erlanger healthcare professionals treat over 250,000 people.
Harrison Medical Center
Washington State
Press Release
With 195,000 outpatient visits each year across its five locations, Harrison Medical Center turned to GE's eHealth Solutions to find a solution for information sharing and clinical collaboration across the facilities with 415 physicians. Harrison has multiple and different EMR systems, which could not readily exchange needed clinical data and looked to GE for their information technology leadership. Adar Palis, Executive Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer of Harrison Medical Center, explains, "Working with GE to implement a Health Information Exchange (HIE) supports our 'Vision 2015' strategic priorities around physician and provider alignment, operations redesign, and cultural transformation. GE's HIE platform is helping us to improve the quality and efficiency of the care our clinician community provides our patients." The Health Information Exchange is live, allowing physicians to search and view patient documents such as history and physicals, lab and pathology reports from within their EMR workflow.
Inova
Falls Church, VA
Press Release
Inova Alexandria Hospital's emergency room began accessing patient prescription records electronically this past August - the first step toward creating a network of shared medical data in Northern Virginia. The program is expected to save money for both hospital groups and consumers. "You can bet your bottom dollar we believe there will be some efficiency gains," said Geoff Brown, chief information officer for the 16,000-employee, $2.25 billion nonprofit health system. Inova Health System (Inova ) volunteered to host the pilot because of the program's potential to cut down on medical errors and weed out unnecessary or contradictory prescriptions.
KeyHIE
Central and Northeast Pennsylvania
Press Release
Keystone Health Information Exchange (KeyHIE), which serves central and northeast Pennsylvania communities, is expanding the region's health information exchange (HIE) to augment its chronic disease management capabilities and expand its reach to many more healthcare providers. "Working with GE, we've achieved our initial goal of improving patient care by providing critical patient information, like problems, medications, allergies, to our emergency department physicians in order to make the best possible decisions at the point of care," said Jim Younkin, Director at KeyHIE._Geisinger Health System, an integrated health services organization recognized for its innovative use of healthcare IT-supported care coordination, is an original and active participant in KeyHIE. Leveraging KeyHIE's infrastructure is a key element in Geisinger's $16 million Keystone Beacon Community award, which aims to extend the HIT-driven coordinated care model to more constituents.
NoVaRHIO
Northern Virginia
Press Release
"GE Healthcare is a vital business partner in our initiative to improve patient care in Northern Virginia," said Philip Reilly, Chairman of the NoVaRHIO board. (NoVaRHIO) "We believe that from a product perspective GE delivers the greatest value today and, long-term, we're confident they will continue innovating as the industry changes and develops. We know GE Healthcare eHealth will support our efforts to develop a sustainable model that supports the care of patients throughout northern Virginia."
St. Clair Hospital
Pittsburgh, PA
Press Release
St. Clair Hospital (St. Clair) teamed with GE Healthcare to place St. Clair Hospital and its physicians among the most integrated users of electronic health records in the region. "The electronic health records, available to any of the 550 physicians with admitting privileges at St. Clair Hospital, will include all of a patient's electronic information from all sites of care (hospital stays, emergency department visits, physician office visits, and eventually skilled nursing facility data) within the St. Clair community, and present it to a physician in a single view. Through the use of GE Healthcare's eHealth Information Exchange (eHIE) technology, the patient's health records will be synthesized across the different sites of care. This will provide a convenient and more complete picture of patients' health and enable physicians to make the highest quality clinical decisions for patients" said Richard J. Schaeffer, vice president and chief information officer, St. Clair Hospital.
Västra Götaland Region
Sweden
Press Release
The Västra Götaland region (VGR) in southern Sweden is home to one of Europe's most innovative and connected healthcare communities where a network of diverse radiology systems, named the BFR (Bild och funktionsregister), serves all of the region's 17 hospitals. VGR announced an extension of its contract with GE serving the region through 2015, that includes an expansion and enhancement of the solution it provides through the addition of several new software applications, including the eHealth Image Exchange platform and Centricity* Enterprise Archive. This expanded access gives more patients the benefit of obtaining inputs from remote specialists and allows their care teams to seek second opinions seamlessly in order to create a more holistic patient care plan. "One of the reasons we chose to expand with GE is the flexible, standards-based eHealth Image Exchange platform. We are committed not only to provide the best care possible today, but also in the future. That requires implementing a robust platform and working with an organization like GE, who focuses on driving innovation and new technology" says Lars Lindsköld, BFR System Owner. "GE is a player in the global arena and also is a part of the global standardization organization, both of which are essential for continuous improvement and for understanding healthcare IT complexity and managing its changes."
