Lifespan is a five-hospital system in Providence, R.I., managing more than 500,000 radiology and cardiology exams per year. To balance the image management needs across departments, meet the daily demands of access to full clinical information across their health system with an eye on future participation in the Accountable Care initiative, Lifespan is embarking on a multi-year journey to leverage IT infrastructure as a strategic asset and utilize a combination of an enterprise vendor neutral archive coupled with archive neutral PACS for radiology, cardiology, endoscopy and other departments. This modular, scalable approach will allow Lifespan to establish and manage a defined architecture, while supporting autonomy at the department level.
Canada Health Infoway (CHI) has been instrumental in the use of health information technology to transform healthcare with the following benefits, to date1:
Radiologist Productivity2:
• 25-30% improvement in radiologist productivity
Patient benefits2:
• Elimination of up to 17,000 unnecessary patient transfers
• 30-40% improvement in exam report turnaround times, reducing patient wait times and patient length of stay2
Overall Benefits2:
• An estimated $850M to $1B a year in health system efficiencies through increased clinical productivity
Thomas Hough, founder of True North Consulting, will detail CHI’s use of information technology to achieve these benefits, including their certification process that covers archive neutral PACS and vendor neutral archives. He also will discuss how U.S.-based facilities can utilize these lessons learned to allow better PACS connectivity across a healthcare enterprise.
1 - Canada Health Infoway | What We Do
2 - Canada Health Infoway | Benefits Realization