Following the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' July
announcement of requirements for "meaningful use" of electronic health records, GE Healthcare
is rolling out a version of its Centricity Enterprise application that
incorporates these objectives. Centricity allows enterprises keep track of
patient flow and manage a practice's revenue cycle.
Centricity Enterprise 6.9, which
GE released July 20, provides a built-in workflow for consistent care of
patients from one facility to another and for inpatients as well as outpatients
(described in the medical field as "ambulatory").
The integrated platform achieves the meaningful-use objective of "continuity
of care," Frank Pecaitis, general manager for GE Healthcare IT, explained
to eWEEK. Patients can be followed by clinicians at any location in a hospital
system.
Version 6.9 also adds a registry module to help monitor the flow of patients
in and out of medical facilities. The module lets medical professionals set
workflow alerts for patients with specific conditions and allows doctors and
clinicians to follow the patients over time, said Serene Munroe, GE Healthcare's
marketing leader for Centricity Enterprise.
The workflows also incorporate the meaningful-use requirement of CPOE (computerized
physician order entry), which allows physicians to enter medication orders
directly into the computer to reduce errors.
Centricity Enterprise runs on
Hewlett-Packard's NonStop servers, which provide full-time availability,
disaster recovery and fault tolerance to 24-hour hospitals and clinics, Pecaitis
said.
"It's a highly available, extremely powerful throughput computing
technology, and it's a competitive advantage for us in the industry and in the
marketplace, in that it can scale to very large institutions as well small
enterprises under a hosted model," he said.
Another key feature is embedded decision support, Munroe said. As required
by the meaningful
use guidelines, the software alerts clinicians and doctors to potential
interactions between drugs and allergies. The software also allows medical
facilities to use automated discharging of patients based on diagnosis,
medication and allergies.
On June 15, GE also announced a plug-and-play
SAAS (software-as-a-service) option for Centricity that allows doctors to
keep track of patients easily in the cloud.
Companies must implement the government's meaningful use objectives by 2011
to take advantage of stimulus money allotted for electronic health records
under HITECH (Health Information Technology for Economic and
Clinical Health Act).
With Centricity Enterprise, GE hopes to bring wider adoption of electronic
records across the health care industry.
"This technology really provides a high degree of success [in] getting
clinicians, doctors and nurses to actually use it, and that has been one of the
major challenges in the industry," said Pecaitis. "Meaningful use is
forcing the hand to get doctors to really use EMRs and do the ordering
electronically versus paper and pen."
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