"One of the big challenges of realizing electronic health records in the U.S. is the lack of hospital IT systems and medical technologies that communicate with each other and thus share critical patient data," said Oran Muduroglu, CEO, Healthcare IT, for Philips Medical Systems. "We design and deliver medical solutions with open IT architectures that enable our systems to communicate with other manufacturers' systems to optimize patient care. Ensuring that physicians have access to all critical patient information at the point of care is vital to patients' well being. Delivering on this vision required bringing together best-in-class technologies from all aspects of healthcare."

Industry researcher Gartner Group has pointed to the fact that dated IT architecture and applications in hospitals, as well as the diversity of incompatible applications available, are impeding changes in the U.S. healthcare system that could reduce costs and improve patient safety. In a 2005 report, they stated that "IT is an essential part of the healthcare ecosystem, and done right, IT can save time,effort, lives and even the organization."


Experience the Patient Care Cycle

In addition to weaving a story about its clinical advances, Philips illustrates the flow of information across the care cycle through a hypothetical patient navigating the critical path from home-to-hospital and back home again. Philips demonstrates their approach to patient-centric care by showing how healthcare IT, the modality and the patient-clinician relationship combined in one integrated cycle of care promotes quality care, optimizes efficiency and impacts patient satisfaction.

They begin with the patient at home, experiencing pain but empowered to initiate the care cycle using Xtenity Patient Portal to request an appointment with their primary care physician. The patient accesses their EHR from home, completes a visit with the primary care physician, gets referred to Computed Tomography (CT) for a diagnostic procedure, and then closes the loop when the physician communicates the results back to the patient at home.

The tight integration of the Philips healthcare IT solution is further highlighted through the availability of the patient's health record directly at the CT console in the radiology department. This type of access to the health record assists radiologists and radiology technicians to plan more accurate and effective exams, and help prevent the possibility of errors.

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