A family practice network of four clinics with 44 providers, Puget Sound Family Physicians (PSFP) was an early and aggressive adopter of clinical IT solutions. Since 2006, the advanced features of Centricity EMR have helped the practice's physicians and staff improves patient care and satisfaction, with a positive impact on the organization's bottom line. Now, Puget Sound is lending this implementation and adoption expertise to four other practices in the King County, WA community. With funding provided by a local hospital via federal Stark Law Relaxation legislation, practices in the area are able to purchase electronic medical records, but many of these small physician groups lack the IT staff and experience to optimize their EMR implementation. Puget Sound has been tapped to work directly with the practices during all phases of the switch from paper-based to digital healthcare, advising each group's leadership and sharing best practices for clinical content and workflows.
"The model of practices like Puget Sound is one that can be replicated in other communities across the country, with the Centricity EMR - a solution which provides a high degree of clinical workflow flexibility and expertise, supports open standards for connectivity to other systems and devices, and offers the ability to measure outcomes against regional and national standards," said James M. Corrigan, Vice President and General Manager, GE Healthcare IT. "With over 35 years of enabling business performance while helping our customers optimize clinical care, this effort underscores our commitment to closing industry gaps between efficiency and quality of patient care."
Puget Sound's ability to stay ahead of the curve comes both from within the practice and from the development expertise of GE Healthcare. Most recently, when the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) issued regulations governing the use of tamper-resistant features for electronic prescriptions, PSFP relied on the quick actions of GE Healthcare to update the EMR with features that support compliance. Prior to CMS issuing the final regulation, the practice had prepared for the change by setting up a custom workflow for prescriptions that sent the data to a devoted printer tray, containing special tamper-resistant paper. With the new electronic templates provided by GE Healthcare, Puget Sound expects to completely replace this cumbersome process, and will be able to revert to a fully electronic prescription workflow.
In addition, the practice is a member of GE's Medical Quality Improvement Consortium (MQIC), a service which allows healthcare organizations to submit de-identified patient data from Centricity EMR and then access quality outcomes reports - allowing an objective assessment of patient care quality at PSFP against established standards. Through participation in MQIC, all eligible providers at Puget Sound have achieved certification from the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) for their Diabetes Physician Recognition Program.
ABOUT CENTRICITY ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORD:
Centricity EMR is an electronic medical record system that enables ambulatory care physicians and clinical staff to document patient encounters, streamline clinical workflow, and securely exchange clinical data with other providers, patients, and information systems.
Centricity EMR is used by thousands of physicians to manage millions of patient records, and is among the most widely used ambulatory care electronic medical records. Centricity EMR empowers healthcare providers to deliver the highest quality of care at lower costs.
Centricity EMR version 9.0 from GE Healthcare is a CCHIT Certified® product for Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT® ) Ambulatory EHR 2007. The Commission's product certification designates that a healthcare information technology product has been tested against a comprehensive set of functionality, interoperability and security criteria and has passed inspection of 100 percent of the criteria. The Certification Commission's inspection process is based on real-life medical scenarios designed to test products rigorously against the clinical documentation needs of providers and the quality and safety needs of healthcare consumers and payers.
CCHIT® and CCHIT Certified® are registered marks of the Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology.
ABOUT GE HEALTHCARE:
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, performance improvement, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform, treat, and monitor disease, so patients can live their lives to the fullest.
GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases, and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection, and disease prevention. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $17-billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 46,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at www.gehealthcare.com.
