October 14, 2010

ImageAware: Creating the visual EHR

The ImageAware team at Cerner is focused on visually enabling the EHR. Clinical imaging has long been a critical component in healthcare delivery. Digitizing the health record and adding digital images provide a deeper level of insight to the patient’s condition. With that in mind, ImageAware uses a visual representation of this model to describe our mission:

Visual EHR

Adding digital images to the EHR creates a "single source of truth" for patient data. It greatly simplifies the problem of capturing, managing, storing, and distributing these images. The key to this process is a world class architecture based on the same patient centric model Cerner uses in the EHR. We capture all media types in a single archive and use this as the foundation to enable image centric workflow across the enterprise.

The advantages to this model are immense. Clinical efficiency and accuracy are enhanced by having access to both EHR data and images in a single view. IT management is simplified with a single architecture that eliminates the silos of information across various departments. The architecture offers many distributed models for flexibility and scalability. Auditing and security are enhanced by using a single system for both text and imaging results.

The next step for the platform is to take advantage of specialty clinical applications that can assist clinicians in diagnosis and treatment. Automated imaging post processing is an example where a cardiac MRI study can be automatically analyzed to provide standardized and quantitative information to the physician. Volumetric data, measurements, ventricular motion, and tissue boundaries can be identified and documented ahead of time. This saves a tremendous amount of time for the technologists and provides better ROI on the use of expensive diagnostic equipment. Cerner will continue to explore ways to capitalize on our imaging architecture to bring value to our clients. We believe the visual EHR will be the new standard in healthcare.