BARRINGTON, Ill.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--GE Healthcare and Erlanger Health System, a non-profit, academic teaching center serving a four-state region, have announced the planned implementation of a regional health information exchange (HIE) to facilitate the seamless and secure flow of patient information among Erlanger’s four hospitals and 13 outpatient facilities.
Erlanger is a Level One trauma center for adults and the only provider of tertiary care services for the citizens of the wider Chattanooga, Tenn. region, encompassing southeast Tennessee, northern Georgia, northern Alabama and western North Carolina. Each year, Erlanger healthcare professionals treat more than 250,000 people.
“We see a tremendous need for streamlined connectivity among our Emergency Departments (EDs), inpatient and ambulatory facilities,” says Laurene Vamprine, Erlanger’s Chief Information Officer (CIO). “We turned to GE because we felt their solution will help provide clinicians with relevant, select clinical information from across our various locations and heterogeneous IT systems. Additionally, it will present the information in a more useful format than the point-to-point approach we have today.”
With GE Healthcare’s industry standards-based eHealth Information Exchange, Erlanger will be able to share clinical summaries with third-party inpatient and ED systems, as well as GE Healthcare’s own Centricity* EMR used in outpatient facilities. Besides connecting Erlanger’s four hospitals and 13 ambulatory care facilities, the HIE will also connect three large practices that use Centricity EMR – University of Tennessee Family Practice, University Medical Associates, and Academic Internal Medicine.
“In addition to having patient data where clinicians need it to make the best possible clinical decisions, our patients will benefit because the GE HIE platform will supply data directly into our planned web-based patient portal, making it easy for patients to see their lab results, medication history and clinical summaries. It’s critical we provide patients with their relevant health information so they can better manage their health. That’s the future of healthcare,” explains Vamprine.
Earl Jones, Vice President and General Manager of GE Healthcare’s eHealth Solutions adds, “For Erlanger, health information exchange means, in part, getting better information to its doctors and nurses for better care decisions. It is also a critical technology platform for meeting Meaningful Use requirements, strengthening patient engagement, and positioning Erlanger for emerging accountable care and pay for performance models.”
Ms. Vamprine, who also chairs the Technology Workgroup for the Health Information Partnership of Tennessee (HIP TN), the State’s non-profit collaborative responsible for health information exchange across the State, will join GE for a webinar on Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 1:00pm ET. She’ll speak about community, regional and statewide HIE initiatives in Tennessee and explain Erlanger’s decision-making process for selecting an HIE platform.
View all the eHealth webinar offerings at http://ehealth.gehealthcare.com/webinars.
*Centricity is a registered trademark of General Electric Company.
ABOUT ERLANGER HEALTH SYSTEM:
Erlanger is the largest Acute Care hospital in Chattanooga and has 4 hospitals with 788 acute beds across the health system. Erlanger services a population of over 250,000 in the Chattanooga and Northern GA area. Erlanger owns 13 outpatient ambulatory facilities and employees approximately 150 physicians.
ABOUT GE HEALTHCARE:
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our broad expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, drug discovery, biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies, performance improvement and performance solutions services help our customers to deliver better care to more people around the world at a lower cost. In addition, we partner with healthcare leaders, striving to leverage the global policy change necessary to implement a successful shift to sustainable healthcare systems.
Our “healthymagination” vision for the future invites the world to join us on our journey as we continuously develop innovations focused on reducing costs, increasing access and improving quality around the world. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employees are committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at www.gehealthcare.com.
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