Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center has received a 2009 Health Imaging & IT Top 25 Connected Healthcare Facilities award. The award is given annually by Health Imaging & IT magazine to institutions that demonstrate extensively developed clinical image distribution systems and advanced electronic medical records (EMR). This is the fourth time Penn State Hershey Medical Center has received this award.
Factors contributing to the award include the breadth and depth of medical images stored and distributed to the clinical enterprise. The imaging system stores and distributes images from radiology, the Heart and Vascular Institute, maternal fetal medicine, ophthalmology, GI endoscopy, bronchoscopy, surgical endoscopy and minimally invasive surgery. Approximately 350,000 studies per year are stored in the system.
The award specifically cites the efficiencies obtained from Medical Center imaging information systems with a 35 percent increase in image volume in the Department of Radiology over the last three years with a concurrent increase in personnel of only 10 percent. The award also cites radiology’s reduction in report turnaround time, which, in June 2009, was under six hours from completion of the patient exam to the final report.
“Our investment in electronic health records has led not only to more efficient care, but to improvements in safety, quality of care and patient satisfaction,” said Dr. Harold L. Paz, chief executive officer of the Medical Center, senior vice president for health affairs at Penn State, and dean of the Penn State College of Medicine. “As an academic medical center, being on the leading edge of health care IT enables us to better prepare our medical students, residents, and other health professionals for a future in which information technology will play a rapidly expanding and evolving role in health care.”
Other factors contributing to the award are the access to images at the point of care at all times, plus the number of physicians who have remote access to the images both from home and while traveling. The ability to share information with the EMR, Clinical Provider Order Entry, clinical decision support, and the advanced HIMMS Analytics stage of the Medical Center’s EMR also contribute to the award. The Medical Center’s ability to store cardiac catheterization studies and advanced hybrid images such as PET/CT and SPECT/CT, and EKGs distinguish the organization from competitors.
In describing the attributes of award-winners, Health Imaging & IT said, “the Top 25 Connected Healthcare Facilities are intelligent and knowledge-enabled healthcare enterprises. They share efficiencies across departments and locations that can reduce patient wait times, overall length of stay, the need for repeat exams and thus alleviate radiation dose to the patient. They handle increased in patient volume with little or no increase in personnel, while refined patient and staff schedules push scanner utilization. Greater workflow efficiencies and tightly monitored billing and collection schemas set the stage for faster reimbursement payments and improvements in customer satisfaction scores among inpatients, outpatients, and staff.”