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PACS Implemented for Enterprise-Wide Cardiology Imaging and Informatics Applications

By MedImaging International staff writers
Posted on 14 Feb 2012

A new integrated picture archiving and communication system (PACS) enables effective patient-centric electronic health records (EHRs) and provides access to images anywhere.

Merge Healthcare (Chicago, IL, USA), a provider of enterprise imaging and interoperability solutions, announced that Southern Illinois Healthcare (Carbondale, IL, USA) will implement Merge’s entire cardiology solution suite across its system of six hospitals and healthcare clinics to create an integrated and enterprise-wide imaging platform.

“Southern Illinois Healthcare represents the type of organization we like to partner with,” said Jeff Surges, CEO, Merge Healthcare. “One of their main goals is to deliver a complete, patient-centric EHR, and they know that to do so, it must include images. In addition, they need to provide physicians with access to those images anywhere, anytime. They turned to Merge because we were the only partner able to provide a solution that solved that challenge.”

“Our challenge was that we were not consistent across our products; we had a piecemeal approach that made workflow difficult for our physicians,” said Dave Holland, vice president and CIO of Southern Illinois Healthcare. “It’s our job to provide our physicians with the tools required to provide care, and those tools must increase efficiency. Now, with the integrated Merge Cardio solution all of the information our physicians need about a patient is right at their fingertips. It’s this type of healthcare technology automation that is driving efficiency into our processes and helping us provide better care.”

Southern Illinois Healthcare will implement the full range of Merge cardiology solutions, including Merge Cardio, an enterprise-level image and information system that manages digital images and clinical tools such as web-based physician reporting; Merge Hemo, a catheterization laboratory knowledge tool, ranked #1 by KLAS (Orem, UT, USA), that incorporates complete functionality for data collection, analysis, and reporting; and Merge iConnect VNA (vendor-neutral archive), which consolidates images from different PACS, specialties, and sites for a consolidated patient view that allows physicians to access current and historic images at the point of care.

Related Links:
Merge Healthcare
Southern Illinois Healthcare

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