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| St. Luke's Integrates Departments, Physicians and Patient Record with PICOM Enterprise |
If you attended any medical conferences
this year, there is one word you probably heard repeatedly-integration.
Almost every medical software company today must be able to
interface with existing or future systems. Thankfully, the
push to integrate is facilitated through standardization efforts
by groups like Health Level Seven (HL7), ACR-NEMA and IHE.
Founded in 1866 in St. Louis, St. Luke's Hospital
is presently located in Chesterfield, Missouri
However, because there are many departments inside hospitals
that need to provide access to patient data as well as receive
information from other departments, implementation is painfully
slow. Each department's needs must be assessed, workflow must
be taken into consideration, and action items must be developed
in order to ensure that the integration goes smoothly.
The Holy Grail of hospital IT infrastructure is communicating
patient information seamlessly between departments. Delivering
information from department to department, giving reading
physicians the tools they need to view and report on patient
studies, and giving referring physicians access to their patient's
records is an important goal that many institutions are striving
to achieve.
ScImage's PICOMEnterprise is a solution that accomplishes
all three of these tasks. At its core, this data management
solution uses a web-enabled Electronic Patient Folder (EPF)
to store and distribute images, information, demographics
and reports from radiology, cardiology or any other department
where these types of data are generated. Viewing tools for
both static and dynamic images are included along with optional
knowledge based reporting and links to third party clinical
reporting systems. Additionally, advanced quantitative image
post-processing modules such as Oblique Slicing, MPR, Cardiac
Scoring, Virtual Colonoscopy, CT/MR Angiography and Bone Mineral
Densitometry can also be integrated into PICOMEnterprise.
ScImage's primary goal is to provide its customers with a
comprehensive solution that can be configured for a variety
of needs. It is that flexibility that attracted St. Luke's
Hospital in Chesterfield, Missouri. Initially, St. Luke's
chose PICOMEnterprise to be their image and information storage
and distribution solution for data generated in the Cardiology
department because the system provided a way to acquire, manage,
distribute and store Cardiac Cath studies inside the hospital.
When St. Luke's chose ScImage as their vendor for filmless
angiography they knew their ultimate goal was to incorporate
the data residing on PICOMEnterprise as part of an ongoing
push to integrate data from all departments in the hospital
into an existing solution for managing and distributing patient
data. That solution, WebPINS, short for Web-Enabled Patient
Information System, came about as a result of St. Luke's IT
team's decision |
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to abandon the weaker elements of
an integration program already in progress. WebPINS is a web-enabled
physician portal where caregivers can go to gather data regarding
their patients' conditions. The GUI displays information about
the patient, including name, medical record number, and admit
and discharge dates. However, the workhorse of the system
is the back-end Sybase infrastructure that includes its database
and integration engine. In fact, more than 70 application
interfaces have been written through this infrastructure,
tying together data from the Hospital Information System,
Laboratory, Cardiology, Radiology, Transcription and other
data sources.
The WebPINS interface is user-friendly and can be used to
quickly assess a patient's condition. Clicking on a patient
name brings up a screen that shows a history of that patient's
encounters with St. Luke's. The GUI gives users the ability
to view all clinical data by departments that have been integrated
into the system.
To help St. Luke's accomplish their goal of creating a physician
portal, ScImage worked closely with the engineering team at
the hospital. A solution to tie the cardiology data stored
on the PICOMEnterprise server inside St. Luke's to the WebPINS
interface was successfully implemented. Now when physicians
need to gain access to a patient's Cath study, they simply
log on to WebPINS and search by patient name or medical record
number. When the patient is located, clicking on a link launches
the ScImage viewing software and loads the study. If physicians
want to see lab results, they simply select that link and
the results are displayed.
This allows the hospital to gain access to data from several
departments, resulting in a "best of breed" approach. The
integration has been so successful that the hospital is now
implementing PICOMEnterprise as a solution for their Radiology
department. Capturing Radiology studies to the server is a
function that is already built-in to the PICOMEnterprise system
and the integration to WebPINS will use the existing conduit
to add RIS order messaging, making the additional investment
minimal.
PicomEnterprise eliminates the wait
for image and information retrieval.
"The business goal is to get clinical information to
physicians at the point of care," said Scott Holtswarth, St.
Luke's Director of Information Services. "Access to a more
complete picture of the patient's health condition is critical.
The result is better patient outcomes and more informed decisions
regarding provision of care. ScImage's engineering team was
able to accept our aggressive requirements using their web-enabled
foundational technology PICOMEnterprise to accomplish that
goal." |
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Customer Focus - Missouri Baptist
“ScImage’s ForeverOnline storage architecture makes backup for disaster recovery and business continuity a much more straightforward process.”
Douglas Sohn - Dir., Cardiac & Vascular Center
Missouri Baptist Medical Center - St. Louis, MO |
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Download this Case Study 
