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GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric Company, announced the launch of Centricity 360, a platform designed to streamline clinical collaboration among unaffiliated caregivers and patients to help reduce duplicate testing, avoid unnecessary patient transfers and lower diagnostic imaging distribution costs.
Centricity 360 is a professional online collaboration tool for clinicians that provides a suite of on-demand medical imaging applications, which allow distributed care teams to collaborate on patient cases in near-real time.
The applications and the collaboration tools are available through an enterprise-grade cloud services platform, and Centricity 360 gives caregivers tools to exchange images and join private communities where they can engage in ongoing diagnosis and treatment discussions.
“Connecting efficiently with our referral network and giving our clinicians easy access to data without having to send a CD is essential to achieving the best outcomes for patients,” Dave Roach, vice president of IT and chief information officer for Kadlec Health System in Washington State, a Centricity 360 collaboration partner, said in a statement. “We are excited to work with GE Healthcare to make significant advances in enhancing patient care.”
The platform, which is currently available for select pilot customers in the United States, aims to address the total cost of ownership challenges posed by traditional on-premise IT systems.
“In our digitally wired world, a 12-year-old can share images and information instantaneously, but your doctor lacks the tools to do the same,” Jan De Witte, president and CEO of GE Healthcare IT and performance solutions, said in a statement. “With Centricity 360, your doctor can liberate the information he or she needs to exchange patient data and images with your care team, who in turn can make fast care decisions, regardless of location.”
GE Healthcare is also providing flexible deployment options, where customers can choose to use “do it yourself” steps to get started or request tailored implementation services that leverage GE Healthcare’s clinical, regulatory and services expertise.
“In critical care situations, speed is of the essence,” Mike Jackman, vice president and general manager of specialty solutions for GE Healthcare IT, said in a statement. “But that speed must be secure. Centricity 360 addresses patient privacy with strong encryption protocols for data at rest and in transit. Centricity 360 supports the interoperability and stringent security standards that are locally required in each region.”
For example, a radiology department using Centricity PACS-IW with Universal Viewer can share a patient’s case takes just one click from the picture archiving and communications system (PACS) user interface.
For radiology departments that use PACS from other vendors, Centricity 360 complements their current workflows with cloud-based image archiving and sharing services.