Cardiovascular Business - October/November 2007 - (Page 11) care—provides everything a cardiology department needs, digital image management, archiving, reporting and workflow management. It links cardiac ORs, echo labs and cath labs—their records, PACS and modalities—with other hospital departments. In a couple of words, it’s cardiac central. “In radiology, basically the workflow is driven by the creation and managing of images; cardiology is quite the opposite—it’s all information-driven,” says John Alex, director of CVIS at the 613-bed Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. “Data really drive the day for cardiologists. So the capture of discrete information, and more importantly, the creation of actionable types of reports from this data are what’s really important,” says Alex, who adds he’s seen a lot of changes since joining Rush in 1986. Rush relies on GE Healthcare’s Centricity to manage their cardiology patient information. Echo, stress, electrophysiology (EP) and electrocardiogram (ECG) are integrated into CVIS. Around since the late 1990s, CVIS debuted with a few kinks. In the last few years, vendors have done some fine-tuning and the systems now meet the needs of cath and echo labs in approximately 30 percent of the 1,500 hospitals with cardiovascular departments. “[CVIS] was not very stable in the beginning; it was very difficult to manage,” says Alex. “The system itself has become more stable over the years. They’ve opened up more and more modules for different areas within cardiology.” Now that the system kinks have been worked out, the industry anticipates annual growth of 10 to 20 percent as more and more hospitals need to be connected. To install a system, they will pay from $250,000 to more than $1 million, depending on the size of the facility. “[CVIS] revolutionized things for us— almost like everyone having a PC and using email.” › William M. Gottliebson, Md, pediatric cardiologist, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, ohio, and assistant professor, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. happens is they start a new chart,” says Gottliebson. “When you work in a big hospital, certainly one that deals with hundreds of thousands of charts, they miss some. Just trying to keep up with the information is really hard.” Gottliebson says prior to HeartSuite, during emergency situations cardiologists often had to rely on family members to provide a patient’s history, which was sometimes incomplete. With CVIS, the physician can review the history with the caller in real-time, and fill in the gaps as needed. Physicians can easily navigate patient reports via a PC, whether in the hospital emergency room or outpatient clinic. Such is the case when the cardiologist is on call. He or she can get a call about a colleague’s patient at home and access his or her records from a home computer via the web-based function. “I just click on cath and it will show me all the old cath reports. Not only can I see the letter that was written about the catheterization, I can see the data,” says Gottliebson. He adds that he can now look through all the data to better understand the treatment and monitoring course, and thereby make better decisions about additional therapies. “[CVIS] revolutionized things for us—almost like everyone having a PC and using email,” says Gottliebson. The internal bridge Cumbersome versus a cinch What a cardiologist needs first and foremost is information— historic, accurate, complete and ready at a moment’s notice. In the “old days,” before the implementation of CVIS, getting that information together was cumbersome, or nearly impossible in some cases. “A paper chart on a patient who is very complicated becomes massive—they become inches and inches thick and then what Internally, replacing the paper chart for the physician is just the beginning of CVIS. Its enterprise-offerings provide answers to workflow and administrative challenges that, in turn, save time and money. “It’s allowed us to manage our time more effectively,” says Alex. From scheduling to procedure reporting to billing, it’s all tracked by CVIS. The system records everything, basically the five Ws— who, what, when, where and why. It ties in all of the functions to the appropriate fields and provides information dissected as needed. In 2004, Memorial Hermann Healthcare System in Houston, Texas, installed the first phase of Agfa HealthCare Heartlab Encompass. Eight of the system’s hospitals currently have Encom- CardiovascularBusiness.com Cardiovascular Business 11 http://www.CardiovascularBusiness.com
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