BARRINGTON, IL - GE Healthcare IT, a leading provider of healthcare information technology, today recognized Puget Sound Family Physicians for its exemplary use of GE Centricity Electronic Medical Record (EMR) to extend the benefits of "going digital" to practices and patients in the greater Seattle area.

A family practice network of four clinics with 44 providers, Puget Sound Family Physicians (PSFP) was an early and aggressive adopter of clinical IT solutions. Since 2006, the advanced features of Centricity EMR have helped the practice's physicians and staff improves patient care and satisfaction, with a positive impact on the organization's bottom line. Now, Puget Sound is lending this implementation and adoption expertise to four other practices in the King County, WA community.

With funding provided by a local hospital via federal Stark Law Relaxation legislation, practices in the area are able to purchase electronic medical records, but many of these small physician groups lack the IT staff and experience to optimize their EMR implementation. Puget Sound has been tapped to work directly with the practices during all phases of the switch from paper-based to digital healthcare, advising each group's leadership and sharing best practices for clinical content and workflows.
"The model of practices like Puget Sound is one that can be replicated in other communities across the country, with the Centricity EMR - a solution which provides a high degree of clinical workflow flexibility and expertise, supports open standards for connectivity to other systems and devices, and offers the ability to measure outcomes against regional and national standards," said James M. Corrigan, Vice President and General Manager, GE Healthcare IT. "With over 35 years of enabling business performance while helping our customers optimize clinical care, this effort underscores our commitment to closing industry gaps between efficiency and quality of patient care."

Puget Sound's ability to stay ahead of the curve comes both from within the practice and from the development expertise of GE Healthcare. Most recently, when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued regulations governing the use of tamper-resistant features for electronic prescriptions, PSFP relied on the quick actions of GE Healthcare to update the EMR with features that support compliance. Prior to CMS issuing the final regulation, the practice had prepared for the change by setting up a custom workflow for prescriptions that sent the data to a devoted printer tray, containing special tamper-resistant paper. With the new electronic templates provided by GE Healthcare, Puget Sound expects to completely replace this cumbersome process, and will be able to revert to a fully electronic prescription workflow.

More HCB News