With a focus on connecting the healthcare system through clinical information exchange, GE Healthcare introduced today its next-generation eHealth platform in the Middle East. The Global eHealth Solutions platform includes expanded services for health information exchange, a clinical portal, and a patient health management system all focused on delivering the value of eHealth to healthcare providers, health insurance bodies and governmental agencies
These solutions help to simplify the collection and exchange of data across a wide variety of legacy clinical systems, including imaging products (RIS/PACS – Radiology Information System/Picture Archiving and Communication System), Hospital Information Systems (HIS), Electronic Medical Records (EMR), laboratories, pharmacies and other systems used for diagnostics or patient monitoring. The global portfolio is a centerpiece of this week’s showcase at Saudi E-Health 2010 Conference.
“The main goal of our eHealth strategy is to improve quality and access in healthcare while reducing costs,” said Bernard Algayres, general manager – eHealth of GE Healthcare IT, Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region. “Through our global eHealth portfolio, we are actively addressing some of the most critical challenges to modern care including the lack of an effective framework for inter-system connectivity.”
At the core of the new eHealth Solutions platform is the eHealth Information Exchange (HIE) – a standards-based HIE infrastructure that integrates clinical data from across disparate systems and manages the wide variety of clinical records, document types and terminologies pervasive in today’s healthcare system. Building upon the highly flexible infrastructure developed by strategic partner InterComponentWare (ICW), the eHealth solutions platform features help to assist customers in managing patient consent and privacy, provider notifications and security.
Sitting on top of the platform are applications such as the eHealth Clinical Portal and eHealth Patient Health Manager. The eHealth Clinical Portal provides clear visibility into aggregated data. The eHealth Patient Health Manager (PHM) is a web-based tool for patient engagement. With a PHM, patients can access their clinical data, record data points such as weight, glucose levels and blood pressure readings, and then share this information with their medical team or family members through controlled data access.
All of GE Healthcare’s connectivity technologies rely on full implementations of the IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) international standards such as XDS (Cross Enterprise Document Sharing), DICOM and HL7, in order to collect and aggregate patient data produced by disparate legacy IT systems. With the aid of a global registry, standardized clinical documents and data can be accessed via the internet by physicians or patients.
“By leveraging the partnership with ICW, our eHealth portfolio enables the timely access and interpretation of clinical data and images throughout the continuum of care,” explained Algayres. “Through eHealth, we are working to develop standards-based infrastructure, an innovative suite of collaborative services and clinical decision support tools that will empower providers and patients as never before.”