TeraMedica, Inc. and New South Wales (NSW) Health have brought their solutions together to provide imaging services and their distribution to a health imaging exchange (HIE) that serves more than seven million people in Australia, and will eventually connect nearly 110 disparate imaging systems in clinical facilities – each using their own PACS, RIS, EMR, clinical and business practices, and patient identifiers.
A common problem in the U.S. is the lack of standards, which makes many electronic health applications unable to interoperate with different systems.
NSW Health implemented TeraMedica's Evercore HIE Solution, with its Evercore Enterprise Vendor Neutral Architecture (VNA) as the framework for the project.
The Health Imaging Exchange project began in February 2012 across 12 hospitals, serving a portion of the Sydney area, including regional geographic connections, according to a news release.
“NSW Health is a truly unique statewide health imaging exchange when it comes to scalable, vendor neutral architecture,” said Jim Prekop, TeraMedica president and CEO. “We are extremely pleased to provide our patient-centered clinical imaging management and distribution solution, Evercore HIE, to provide a direct and positive impact on the quality of patient care while simultaneously reducing NSW Health’s total cost of operations.”
Greg Strowig, NSW Health vice president of client services, noted that the use of Evercore’s standards-based universal image distribution system should allow those served by the HIE to see immediate improvements in patient care throughout remote regions.
“NSW Health will realize increased efficiency, accuracy and patient satisfaction leading to decreases in time, manual labor and disparate system costs across a wide geography,” he added. “NSW Health, and the healthcare IT world in general, face significant data integration challenges in the delivery of meaningful use and patient-centered healthcare. Evercore’s Web services architecture provides the ability to efficiently combine disparate clinical objects in a central clinical content manager, satisfying the medical team’s need for a holistic view of patient data in real time.”
The NSW Health covers an area larger than Texas. But the HIE will consolidate information into “a patient-centric imaging folder, incorporating DICOM and other vital clinical content (beyond DICOM),” the source said.
All in all, the HIE will connect 9 PACS systems, processing over three million annual imaging procedures. Additionally, Evercore HIE will provide an eventual gateway to the national government’s master patient index and the ability to provide complete electronic medical records across Australia.
Shifting over to EHRs and then having them all be able to talk to each other is a huge undertaking, as the U.S. has already discovered. “[The EHR] must be capable of consuming and providing information to coordinate care across multiple sites,” wrote Karen Bell, MD, MSS, chair of the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology. “They must be able to exchange information with patients, or possibly their remote monitoring devices. “
A tall order, but Australia’s getting it right, and hopefully the U.S. will too.
Edited by
Braden Becker
