New products from ECRI, ETIAM, ImaSight, WebMD
ECRI (www.ecri.org) has published its 19th annual edition of the 2007 Healthcare Standards: Official Directory. This updated print edition indexes titles of more than 39,000 official and hard-to-find healthcare standards, practice guidelines, policy statements, and other authoritative documents from more than 1,250 issuing organizations. Titles of U.S. federal and state healthcare-related laws and regulations also are included, the organization said.

The directory verifies, indexes, and updates medical and legal healthcare standards from organizations around the world. ECRI’s annual print edition and its web partner, HCS Online, are designed to facilitate searching for a broad range of documents on thousands of topics such as asthma, bariatric surgery, breast cancer screening, chronic pain, disaster preparedness, wound care, and more. The enhanced specialty search feature allows for fast, precise searching on clinical areas, such as communicable diseases, obstetrics and psychiatry.

The resource is broken down by topic and information type, such as:
  • Standards—A broad range of documents, including: standards, clinical guidelines, reports, laws, regulations, position papers, technical statements, advisories, policies, procedures, hazard reports, recommended practices, technology assessment reports, and other related titles. Each entry includes the complete title, date of issue, type of standard, related keywords, name of issuing organization, and links to contact information for obtaining the full-text documents;
  • Keywords—Continually updated and cross-referenced;
  • Organizations—Current contact information for more than 1,250 issuing organizations worldwide;
  • Laws and Regulations—Mandatory/statutory U.S. healthcare-related laws and regulations issued by the federal government, plus laws and regulations issued by state government agencies; and
  • Clinical-Specialty Search (online only)—Nearly 50 clinical specialties, including: alternative medicine, oncology, nuclear medicine, genetics, gynecology, orthopedics, plastic surgery, and more.


ETIAM has released a new version of its worklist broker, WillB, a smart agent that interfaces imaging modalities with information systems. WillB efficiently automates the workflow of healthcare organizations by eliminating repetitive data entry, by streamlining scheduling of patient examinations, and by linking images with reports and medical records. WillB is designed to make the patient identifiers transferred by information systems available to the imaging network through the DICOM Worklist service and handles patient ID corrections and patient merges in compliance with IHE profiles. The new version enables operators to create a study order and a patient encounter including the identifiers when a message has not been received from the information system. Then, it is possible to forward this information to the information system and to another destination (e.g. PACS) for notification purposes. These functions are possible through a web browser.

The modalities that do not support the DICOM Worklist service are integrated into the workflow through a mechanism that generates barcodes automatically. These new features make it possible to ensure a seamless workflow when:
  • information systems (HIS, RIS) do not handle some types of transactions;
  • the transaction messages have not reached the broker; and
  • there is no information system upstream at all.


Cedara Software has inked a strategic relationship with InSite One to provide online radiology services. Cedara will provide InSite One with a new web-based viewing tool for exams stored on clients’ archives to allow referring physicians access to results and reports. Known as InDex Web, InSite One's offering will be based on the Cedara I-Reach. Cedara I-Reach is a web-based PACS that provides access to relevant information at the appropriate time, presented in the proper context, with clinically relevant tools to ensure patient outcomes are accurate and timely. For medical imaging centers and healthcare facilities, I-Reach provides online report and image viewing, security features that support HIPAA compliance, 3D rendering, a wide array of clinical tools, back-end storage and archiving. As an internet-deployable technology, I-Reach provides ultimate image and information access between different healthcare facilities.
 
"We are very please to be working with InSite One," said Loris Sartor, president of Cedara Software. "By combining InSite One's experience in the onsite and offsite image archive and disaster recovery market with Cedara's advanced technology, a broader range of services become available to the end user market. This relationship creates a significant new ASP solution for American healthcare providers."
 

Ottawa, Canada-based ImaSight (formerly Imascope), a developer and supplier of innovative digital radiography technologies, launched the ImaSight4600 digital radiography sensor. The sensors are initially targeted for use in veterinary diagnostics, though future versions of the product are expected to be introduced this year and will be targeted towards applications in human health care, the company said.
 
The ImaSight technology involves the conversion of x-rays into four different light wavelengths, which are integrated through a series of mirrors and lenses to create a sharp image. The ImaSight4600 sensor’s resolution, at 4.6 lp/mm, exceeds the American College of Radiology’s recommended minimum of 2.5 lp/mm. In addition, the ImaSight4600 incorporates an industry-leading graphical user interface developed in conjunction with Ottawa-based Macadamian Technologies Inc.
Trimed Popup
Trimed Popup