CHICAGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Merge Healthcare (NASDAQ: MRGE), a leading provider of enterprise imaging and interoperability solutions, today announced that HealthPartners, the largest consumer-governed, nonprofit health care organization in the nation, has selected its iConnect vendor neutral archive to create a true enterprise-wide imaging strategy across all of its hospitals and clinics.

With iConnect VNA, HealthPartners can now consolidate medical images from all of their care delivery locations and archives into one system and image enable their EHRs. This will provide physicians a full and complete view of a patient's medical history without having to access multiple systems, thereby speeding time to treatment and improving the delivery of care.

In addition, HealthPartners can now automate the in-bound electronic processing of images for dozens of referring entities into Regions Hospital which will improve clinical response time for trauma patients and reduce the complexities and delays typically associated with handling CDs.
"HealthPartners understands how important it is to have an image-enabled EHR," said Jeff Surges, CEO of Merge Healthcare. "With iConnect, their physicians will have access to medical images, regardless of their location or where that image originated. There's no question that access to this type of information empowers physicians and provides a myriad of patient benefits, including a reduction in duplicative exams and unnecessary exposure to radiation."

"When medical information and images are stored in disparate silos, it hampers the quality of care and drives up ongoing costs," said Kim LaReau, Vice President & CIO of HealthPartners' flagship hospital, Regions Hospital. "With iConnect VNA, we have a consolidated solution that stores all of our images in one system, is helping to modernize our infrastructure, and enhance our disaster recovery initiatives by providing a zero downtime environment for medical imaging."

In use at more than 300 sites, iConnect VNA is the most widely-deployed vendor neutral archive in the industry. iConnect VNA stores medical images from multiple sites and multiple specialties, providing a valuable patient-centric view of all diagnostic images, as well as workflow documents, and other key information from multiple specialties on demand.

In addition to iConnect VNA, HealthPartners utilizes iConnect Share and iConnect Access which help them expand the referral network, enhance reimbursement, decrease costs, shorten time to treatment and improve patient care.

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