Community Hospital South implements GE Healthcare's Centricity Enterprise solution

www.gehealthcare.comSep 23 2009

GE Healthcare, a leading provider of healthcare information technology, announced Community Hospital South (Indianapolis) is now live with GE Centricity™ Enterprise 6.1 and Monitored Care, an integrated clinical, financial and administrative solution that helps streamline workflow and improve productivity across the continuum of care. The implementation of the two solutions will help Community Hospital South capture clinical and medical device data in a patient’s Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system, enabling healthcare providers to provide comprehensive and efficient care.

Community Hospital South is a 200 bed licensed acute care facility serving south-central Indiana and is part of the Community Health Network, a health system nationally recognized for its quality of care and use of healthcare technology. GE Healthcare Centricity Enterprise will automate key clinical processes for lab orders, test results, pharmacy and care documentation with administrative, financial and billing processes throughout a comprehensive EMR system. By providing physicians with immediate access to medical data, the GE solutions help physicians make better- informed treatment decisions, allowing those physicians to decrease the potential for medication error while increasing the quality and safety of patient care. GE Healthcare Centricity EMR has been in place at the hospital since 2002.

Community Hospital South worked extensively with GE throughout the recent implementation process, offering thorough feedback along the way to ensure the final system, now in place, served their needs.

Highlights of the implementation include:

• Centricity Enterprise Monitored Care: Community Hospital South is the first hospital to go live with Centricity Enterprise Monitored Care, which integrates data from patient monitors, ventilators and IVs in monitored environments such as intensive care, cardiac care and emergency departments. This combines lab results, test orders and patient histories in a single EMR accessible from anywhere, helping to reduce time spent by care providers on manual documentation.
• Third party integration: GE’s standards-based technology allows Community Hospital South to seamlessly connect data from non-GE systems into the Centricity Enterprise EMR.

“We are continually working to improve patient care, and our partnership with GE Healthcare is an important part of that process,” said Ed Koschka, chief information officer at Community Health Network. “Bridging inpatient and outpatient data provides physicians with an immediate snapshot of a patient’s health to give them instant access to the information they need to make critical, informed decisions about patient care.”

“As a leader in healthcare IT adoption, Community Health Network is a model for how community hospitals can leverage technology to further improve patient outcomes and the quality of care,” said Dr. Brandon Savage, Chief Medical Officer of GE Healthcare IT. “We are proud to continue our long-term relationship with Community Health Network, a health system dedicated to delivering better medical care through shared information and improved communication.”