Henry Ford Hospital Taps EHealth Global To Integrate External Medical Record Collection With Enterprise-wide EMR Solution

Main Category: IT / Internet / E-mail
Article Date: 01 Jan 2009 - 0:00 PST

email to a friend   printer friendly   view / write opinions   rate article

eHealth Global Technologies announced that Henry Ford Hospital (Detroit, MI) has successfully integrated the company's eHealthConnect medical record collection service with the hospital's existing Electronic Medical Records (EMR) solution and Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS). eHealthConnect is being used by the transplant, hematology/oncology and neurosurgery departments at Henry Ford Hospital. Specialists within these departments now have immediate access to important patient information, including external documents and images that are used to help determine the appropriate course of treatment.

"Time is of the essence when evaluating or treating a critically ill patient who has a life-threatening illness or a failing organ," says Marianne Beach-Langlois, Transplant Administrator at Henry Ford Hospital. "With eHealthGlobal, our specialists now have access to all the patient information they need, wherever they are located throughout the health system and regardless of where that data originated."

eHealthConnect replaces ad hoc data collection with a systematic method that makes patient medical records reliably and quickly available to authorized clinicians. Clinicians make one secure online request to the eHealth Global customer support team who then collect, digitize, organize, store and secure medical records. Medical records are integrated directly into Henry Ford Hospital's EMR and radiology images are transferred in DICOM format into the PACS over a secure virtual private network (VPN) for prompt clinical viewing throughout the enterprise.

"Prior to this integration, our oncologists had to search for external patient medical records," adds Lisa Vezzosi, Practice Administrator for the Josephine Ford Cancer Center at Henry Ford Hospital. "Now, we have one subfolder for oncology services, so our clinicians can locate patient information easier and quicker than before, resulting in a more efficient clinical workflow."

eHealth Global worked directly with Henry Ford Hospital's IT department to electronically integrate eHealthConnect into the facility's existing EMR and PACS environment. All external patient information captured by eHealth Global is transferred to the appropriate subfolder in the EMR, depending upon the type of data (i.e., radiology films and reports, pathology or laboratory results), and image exams are logged into the PACS system after a Radiology Information System order is automatically generated.

"eHealth Global has helped Henry Ford Hospital create a more efficient clinical process by integrating external patient records directly into their existing PACS and EMR," says Ken Rosenfeld, President and Chief Technology Officer. "As a result, clinicians can use the same workstation and tools for accessing external patient records that they already use for viewing internal patient data, removing the need for additional training. Plus, the hospital was able to keep costs down by using existing hardware and infrastructure, although this is not just about saving money, but about helping save lives."

About Henry Ford Hospital

Henry Ford Hospital, a 903-bed tertiary care hospital, education and research complex in Detroit's New Center Area, is the flagship hospital for Henry Ford Health System. The hospital is recognized for clinical excellence and innovation in the fields of cardiology and cardiovascular surgery, neurology and neurosurgery, orthopaedics and sports medicine, organ transplants, and treatment for prostate, breast and lung cancers. Henry Ford is a Level 1 trauma center.

About eHealth Global Technologies

eHealth Global is a leading medical record service provider that combines advanced information technology that is easy to use with its world-class clinical customer support team to collect and manage patient data that resides beyond the digital reach of our clients.

eHealth Global Technologies