OREANDA-NEWS. June 07, 2012. As the explosion of big data continues to transform imaging department workflow, the consolidation of disparate PACS data across the enterprise is helping to simplify large scale image management. Today at SIIM, GE Healthcare is introducing new enhancements designed to improve how radiologists view, navigate, and process big data sets with Centricity* PACS 4.0. The new product release continues to ensure other departments and locations can seamlessly connect to PACS through the Centricity Enterprise Archive, cloud-enabled, vendor neutral archive technology that stores petabytes of data for thousands of GE customers worldwide.

Radiology departments continue to face pressure to reach higher levels of productivity and quality with shrinking reimbursements. Department directors and IT leaders are both keenly aware that imaging performance depends on simplified workflow and rapid access to large volumes of big data. Centricity PACS 4.0 satisfies all of these needs by delivering an intuitive user experience, streamlined mammography views, and Windows 7 support. The release is designed to make radiologists’ lives easier and deliver images to any desktop or mobile device at any time, wherever an internet connection is present.

The new usability features with Centricity PACS 4.0 include:

Navigator with Snap Tool and Timeline – Delivers the ability to quickly and easily drag & drop a series into a monitor region while enhancing workflow and offering multiple options for display such as always on, pin to location, and more.

Single-Click Save – Uses a Quick Save Presentation State to save and apply a presentation state with an auto-generated label and description. No other user interaction is needed.

“Lights off” UI Theme – Decreases eye fatigue and improves reading comfort by offering high contrast icons in reading rooms with dimmer lighting.

Centricity Enterprise Archive streamlines archiving of “multi-ology” images, huge datasets, diagnostic reports, and other clinical information, delivering a universal clinical content repository. As such it brings to all institutions and users a way to easily get access to consolidated patient data, going beyond a classical vendor neutral archiving solution. Regional cloud services built on Centricity Enterprise Archive service billions of patient exams per year.

“We pride ourselves in taking user input into consideration and are very focused on listening to our customers and improving our solutions. We are implementing an Agile Development approach for software development across our portfolio and the customer is at the center of this process,” said Michael Jackman, vice president and general manager of GE Healthcare IT. “Centricity PACS 4.0 is focused on ease of use and productivity enhancements requested by our dedicated user base.”

Centricity PACS 4.0 will be available for sale in early Q3, 2012.

*Centricity is a registered trademark of General Electric Company.