by
Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | April 16, 2018
From the April 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
A Technavio report released last year predicts that the global SPECT market will reach $1.5 billion by 2021. The cardiology segment makes up 35 percent of the market, which is the largest share followed by oncology, general imaging and neurology.
The rise of cardiovascular information systems
As health care increasingly goes digital and the demands of processing high volumes of patient data become more critical, many providers are investing in cardiovascular information systems (CVIS). It’s a costly decision, but one that is likely to yield significant returns.
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In 2013, Ascension-Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare in Wisconsin installed GE’s Centricity Cardio Enterprise, which is both a cardiovascular information system (CVIS) and PACS. They began by implementing digital archiving and structured reporting in the echo and vascular departments, and last October they also brought structured reporting to the cath lab.
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“In the current environment for health care, we found that in order for our physicians to adequately document and report and have the statistical numbers to back up their reporting, we needed to have some kind of a systemwide application that they could all share between the different facilities,” says Jim Schowalter, RCIS and PACS administrator in the health system’s cardiac cath lab.
With 23 hospitals and hundreds of health care facilities across southeast Wisconsin, the health system employs 19,600 individuals — some of whom have to travel to different facilities.
Through the implementation of the Centricity Cardio Enterprise, they have created a centralized view of cardiology images with customizable workflows and the ability to view related radiology images. It also allows for remote, web-based access to a patient’s imaging data across different specialties.
Ascension has experienced a dramatic decrease in turnaround time for cath lab reporting, according to Schowalter. The health system is conducting a scientific study to investigate this further and will present the results in May.
Schowalter and his team are evaluating the time it takes for the reports to get into the health systemwide electronic medical record (EMR) via dictation compared to using Centricity Cardio Enterprise.
