 |
||
 |
|
|
2004 2003200220012000 |
||
|
||
|
Emageon’s Enterprise Diagnostic
Imaging Software Meets IHE Year-Three Framework – Today! Company Releases Commercially Available, Open Systems Solution at RSNA Birmingham, AL (November 20, 2001) -- Emageon, a leading provider of enterprise solutions for diagnostic imaging, announced today that all commercial versions of its software meets the IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) year-three technical framework, fulfilling its goal of accomplishing this feat in time for the 87th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago, November, 25-29, 2001. "IHE enables faster, more efficient, less expensive and more successful integration," said Noel Gartman, Emageon’s vice president of marketing and strategy. "As IHE defines it, standards-based integration solutions are also more flexible, longer-lived and easier and less expensive to maintain than proprietary methods. Emageon participates in the IHE Initiative as a vendor and serves on the IHE Planning and Technical Committees." IHE describes itself as an initiative that brings together the users and developers of healthcare information and imaging systems to advance data integration by removing the barriers to optimal patient care. It makes use of established standards to create a framework of transactions between systems. Under the IHE initiative, healthcare professionals and the healthcare industry achieve consensus on an integration model that grows by annual increments, encompassing progressively more and more transactions among a broader set of systems. "The IHE framework provides the foundation for integration and the IHE integration profiles are fast becoming the baseline behavior for medical imaging architecture," said Emageon CTO, Gary York, PhD. "At Emageon, we believe that the IHE initiative enables open systems solutions that can improve the quality of patient care and represent the best value to our customers. The IHE initiative represents the medical imaging industry’s best effort to address real-world business problems using a standards-based approach." "Physicians, administrators and anyone involved in healthcare are consistently frustrated by computer systems that don’t share information effectively. The inefficiencies, errors, and waste are well documented," continues Gartman. "Healthcare quality and cost concerns cannot be adequately addressed until vital information can be passed seamlessly from system to system – within and across departments – and made available as needed at the point of care." The Integration Profiles outlined in the technical framework offer a common language for healthcare professionals and vendors to use in communicating about IHE and provides a convenient way for both parties to reference the functionality detailed in the IHE Technical Framework. The profiles enable users and vendors to be more specific than simply requesting or promising overall IHE support, without having to restate all of the details regarding IHE actors and transactions defined by the IHE Technical Framework. "Implementing the IHE Year 3 Technical Framework has significant impact to referring physicians," added Gartman. "Physicians gain better access to images, related image information and reports using a consistent standards-based methodology. For example, key images and key image notes can be reviewed quickly rather than cycling through potential hundreds of images. This framework defines how to maintain the consistency of presentation for grayscale images and their presentation state information including user annotations, shutters, flip/rotate, display area, and zoom." Chris Magyar, Emageon’s vice president of research and development added, "At the IHE Year 3 Connect-a-Thon, we tested our product’s ability to integrate with numerous other vendors while serving in the IHE-defined roles of Image Manager, Image Archive, and Structured Report Repository. By supporting all relevant IHE Integration Profiles for these roles, we provide our customers with an infrastructure that makes open-systems a reality. As an Image Manager, our product satisfies the requirements for the Structured Workflow, Patient Information Reconciliation, Consistent Presentation of Image, Key Image Note, and Access to Radiology Information Integration Profiles. As a Report Repository, the product satisfies the requirements for the Structured Image and Numeric Reports and Access to Radiology Information Integration Profiles." According to information provided by the IHE planning committee, "IHE Integration Profiles are not statements of conformance to standards, IHE is not a certifying body and users should continue to request that vendors provide statements of their conformance to relevant standards, such as DICOM and HL7. However, standards conformance is a prerequisite for vendors adopting IHE Integration Profiles and when they adopt the profiles, vendors take a step beyond claiming conformance to standards. Vendors are stating that their systems implement the relevant standards in accordance with the IHE Technical Framework. This blueprint for implementing standards has been proven in public demonstrations where successful integration of multi-vendor environments has been achieved despite minimal time for preparation and testing. They thus attest to the demonstrated capability of their products to integrate with systems adopting the same IHE Integration Profile." Emageon’s CEO, Chuck Jett, said, "We are all very proud of reaching this developmental milestone. Unlike much of the beta software that is seen at many IHE demonstrations, our software being released at RSNA is commercially available and ready to go." For more information on the IHE Year 3 Technical Framework go to www.rsna.org/IHE or send an email to ihe@rsna.org or ihe@himss.org. About Emageon Emageon provides affordable, enterprise-class solutions to manage digital medical images for hospitals, IDNs (integrated delivery networks) and healthcare systems. With essentially limitless scalability, Emageon’s enterprise solution can manage any size facility and complexity - even extremely large, multi-site, multi-specialty medical image repositories. Its high-performance software and open-systems approach eliminates technical obstacles that prevent a health care enterprise from converting to a fully digital environment. Emageon’s cost-effective, managed use business model eliminates financial obstacles to digital transformation and has two solution configurations. The first includes our enterprise archiving and distribution management software bundled with storage management hardware. The second features our integration-friendly, open-systems architecture and includes all necessary software, hardware, rapid-deployment implementation, process optimization and adoption success management. This total solution enhances diagnostic capability, patient care delivery and workflow efficiency of all involved physicians (radiologists, cardiologists, neurologists, orthopedic surgeons, oncologists, etc.) and supporting staff (nurses, technologists, medical records personnel, etc.), as well as improved financial performance for the healthcare enterprise. For additional information on Emageon, visit www.emageon.com. Contact: Noel Gartman Emageon 205-980-7602 ngartman@emageon.com David Latham Delta Capital Management LLC 901-755-0949 yearwood@deltacapital.com |
|
