From the April 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


CMS has created electronic health record (EHR) incentive programs, which provide incentive payments to hospitals that use HER technology to improve patient care. In order to get the payments, providers have to demonstrate that they are “meaningfully using” their EHRs by meeting thresholds for different objectives, according to the CMS website.

Cardiology is realizing that it’s difficult to achieve these goals when its systems remain in silos. Fortunately, technology currently available on the market is now allowing the sector to integrate all those systems and supporting devices.


“The main interest is to improve patient care with efficiency through interoperability within a single hospital and enterprise,” says Val Kapitula, a senior consultant at Ascendian Healthcare Consulting. “In order for enterprise interoperability to occur, cardiology leadership is asked to consolidate their local systems into a single solution and further integrate with enterprise EHR and image archive.”

The cardiovascular information system (CVIS) and cardiology picture archiving and communication system (CPACS) are two systems that work together to integrate all of the cardiology services. CPACS is a repository for images and CVIS stores all of the remaining data like measurements and nurse charting from hemodynamic systems, structured reporting, electrocardiograms and any third-party integrated monitoring systems.

Many vendors have infiltrated the CVIS and CPACS markets including Philips Healthcare, GE Healthcare and McKesson. The McKesson CVIS is a single platform design that merges data from multiple sources and creates a complete cardiovascular electronic patient record filled with images, reports and waveforms.

“We basically break down the traditional silos that we’ve seen in cardiology and we provide a single unified archive and database for the entire cardiology department,” says Kyle Souligne, product marketing manager for cardiology at McKesson.

When a patient goes in for an echocardiography procedure, the cardiologist has to pull information from separate systems but with this single-solution platform, all of the information is held within one database.

The other major CVIS products are Philips’ Xcelera and GE’s Mac- Lab. But Souligne says that what makes McKesson’s product unique is that it works under a single archive and information database.

Make way for FFR
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the use of stents in 1993 and they have become so popular that there is now controversy about whether they are being overused. This has caused many physicians to reconsider their course of action for patients.

April 2014 Magazine

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