AURORA UPGRADES IMAGING SYSTEM WITH HELP FROM EMAGEON

A new Aurora Health Care facility in Oshkosh, Wis., will soon be installing an enterprise-wide digital imaging platform from Emageon, a provider of medical image management software.

This implementation will provide digital image acquisition, archiving, distribution, and viewing functions to improve workflow and storage for the cardiology, radiology, and ER departments. Aurora's end-users are doctors, nurses, technicians, and administrative staff members.

Routing images from the hospital to a referring physician, improving turnaround time for image retrieval, expediting patient treatment and care, as well as lowering costs by eliminating film production are major benefits of the new system.

The system provides integrated radiology information systems (RIS) and patient and archiving communications services (PACS). Merge eFilm, Philips, GE Medical, and Siemens are also big players in this area. Scalability and being able to operate effectively on an enterprisewide level were factors in Aurora's decision to choose Emageon.

By switching from film to digital imaging, Aurora will be able to quickly distribute images to multiple facilities. "We will be able to save a lot of time with this," said Jay Lundberg, manager of capital technology at Aurora. "The time it takes to transfer images will go from hours to days to minutes to hours."

The time reduction process begins when a patient is admitted, and his or her contact information and planned imaging modality (MRI, CT scan, or X-ray) is entered into Aurora's RIS. From there, based on the physician's orders, the information is uploaded into the Emageon system.

The physician then generates a report to be transcribed into the RIS before being archived. "Most of these things occur concurrently," Lundberg said. "After an image is archived, it can be readily accessed by a physician. With film storage, you can only use one image at a time."

All images taken at the new facility will be archived daily at Aurora's central repository in Milwaukee, which will have backup copies in case of an emergency. Aurora will support Emageon's platform on a Linux-based system maintained by two in-house IBM servers.

"Going forward, we will be able to maintain and increase the central repository on a standard system for all Aurora facilities," said Patrick Trim, director of capital services at Aurora.

"By reducing costs and having Aurora work off of an enterprisewide infrastructure, we anticipate all imaging-related operations will be more efficient," said Milton Silva-Craig, chief operating officer of Emageon. "Aurora is going digital on a tight deadline. Employees need to get ramped up, and modalities need to be fine-tuned. We also need to be sensitive to all of its other projects, since a new facility is opening."

Silva-Craig expects installation to take 90-120 days. An Emageon product manager will be on site to facilitate training for new users.

"We are working off of very defined timelines as part of a larger coordinated effort to open a new facility," Trim said. "Knowing the exact status of everything is very important. With a rollout like this, there is not much room for error."

Emageon declined to disclose pricing information for its enterprise software platform.

Jeff Berman, Health-IT World
jeff_berman@health-itworld.com

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