Cardiovascular Business - March/April 2008 - (Page 15) Sponsored by an educational grant from Agfa HealthCare & EMC Corporation › Data CritiCal: Information Infrastructure Accelerates CVIS Workflow W EMC Centera content-addressed storage. hile implementing a CVIS can streamline cardiovascular imaging and information management, ensuring that the image management and reporting capabilities have a strong information infrastructure in place to support and facilitate clinical workflow is key to its success and survival. Establishing a strong information infrastructure is priority No. 1 to provide the scalability, accessibility and redundancy an organization needs. Zeeba Mercer, director of technology for Aris Teleradiology, part of Summa Health System in northeast Ohio, says that with EMC CLARiiON networked storage systems and EMC Centera content-addressed storage, both radiology and cardiology gained the necessary infrastructure to support short term and long-term archiving. “We needed something that could accommodate seven years worth of data to maintain ACR compliance,” Mercer says. “With an annual volume for all five hospitals of almost half a million procedures per year, we needed an infrastructure that could handle new procedures plus prior procedures to be able to expand as we grow.” For Norton Healthcare, in Louisville, Ky., EMC CLARiiON and EMC Centera offered a more robust way for the systems’ nearly 2,000 physicians to access and store critical patient data including cardiology images, according to Tim Ely, clinical imaging project manager. With the annual medical records volume growing exponentially, Norton determined that EMC’s backup, recovery and archiving solutions would help accelerate clinical workflow and improve turn-around times. “One of our IT objectives is to have one central repository that any physician can access to gain any and all information on their patients,” Ely says. The objective is to get everything—the HIS, cardiac and radiology images and reports—into the EMR with immediate access, Ely says, and with an EMC information infrastructure, they have achieved this. Mercer and Ely agree that there are two things IT departments need to analyze about the organization’s current information infrastructure prior to implementing a cardiology PACS or CVIS: the capability of the infrastructure to support the necessary bandwidth and storage capacity, and an understanding of the end-result of the implementation. Mercer says it is important to look at how many facilities will be incorporated and how much bandwidth is needed between those facilities because “if you have slow images transfers coming back and forth from the data center and then being dispersed back out to the facilities and referring physicians’ offices, patient care will be delayed,” she says. Summa currently has 1 gigabit lines between facilities and DS3 lines for their outpatient centers. “you need to have a three-, five- and seven-year plan for storage to get an accurate estimate of future growth based on the amount of studies and type of studies you hope to send over that timeframe,” Ely says. Norton simply added more space to cardiology and echocardiography as needed, building on the existing capacity. The second piece to the information infrastructure puzzle, Mercer says, is an understanding the end-goal of the implementation. “Once that has been determined, see what is needed to accomplish that,” she says. For example, to accomplish the goal of becoming a paperless and filmless system, Mercer needed an information infrastructure that would enable the ability to pull up prior imaging studies and information in a short-term capability, while at the same time, duplicate it to the long-term archive. “The need for clinical case management is to be quick. And to be competitive, you need a solid information infrastructure to support that,” Mercer adds. “The deployment of EMC solutions helped us to unify all key healthcare professionals in our system together to provide best possible care to our patients.” By Sarah Lamberti Standardized text covers the gamut of cardiac needs from staging criteria for coronary interventions to post-procedural treatment reommendations for patients. Although care is individualized for each patient, many treatment regimens are used repeatedly. Providing multiple standardized recommendations allows for uniform documentation of care. Other workflow gains originate from the system’s IT indepen- dence. IMPAX CV can communicate with an array of other imaging and IT systems. During a recent upgrade, EMH Medical Center wed IMPAX CV to its hemodynamic monitoring system to reduce lab workload. Now, when technologists enter patient data into the hemodynamic monitoring system, it is automatically transferred to IMPAX CV, which saves keystrokes and time and minimizes data entry errors. There are other important re- CardiovascularBusiness.com Cardiovascular Business 1 http://CardiovascularBusiness.com
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