OREANDA-NEWS. June 21, 2013. When leaders at Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare (MLH), a not-for-profit health system based in Memphis, Tenn., saw the opportunity to standardize their suite of diagnostic imaging solutions, they capitalized on it.

The seven-hospital system will deploy McKesson's portfolio of enterprise medical imaging products across its various facilities to help improve physician collaboration, streamline data management, and simplify its imaging archive process with a single point of access.

The hospital's clinical stakeholders, in partnership with its IT and engineering services group, were unanimous in their decision to partner with McKesson. Everyone agreed that the McKesson solution best met their stakeholder requirements by supporting the enterprise's needs to provide streamlined access to information and improve workflow and data management.

Using McKesson Radiology™, a picture archiving and communication system (PACS), the health system will be able to easily view and analyze medical images and provide diagnostic reports across the enterprise. By implementing McKesson Cardiology™, the industry's most comprehensive cardiovascular information system (CVIS), the MLH care team will have complete access to cardiovascular images and reports in real-time, including a focus on pediatric cardiology. With QICS™, a qualitative information and communication system, users will be able to collaborate on critical data with the appropriate workflow, while supporting quality initiatives.

"By deploying these solutions together, we can improve workflow efficiency for our clinicians and decrease the complexity of our current IT infrastructure," said Alastair MacGregor, senior vice president and chief healthcare information officer, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare. "In doing so, we expect to reduce our cost of ownership. We also will be able to consolidate information that's essential for making diagnoses, which will enable our medical and clinical staff to make more informed decisions faster."

Additionally, MLH will leverage McKesson Study Share™, a web-based knowledge management system, and McKesson Enterprise Image Repository™ to help simplify enterprise-wide access to imaging information. Physicians will now have the ability to chat, launch a context-sensitive case for review, agree or disagree on the assessment, and immediately go back to their normal workflow from any computer. The ability to launch studies from either system with immediate notifications will help improve image management and staff collaboration. By reducing the complexity of interfaces across the enterprise, MLH will not only be able to improve decision support, but will also be able to lower the costs associated with interfaces and help decrease the need for future migrations.

"Large organizations like Methodist Le Bonheur need systems that are designed to seamlessly interoperate and provide intelligent workflow that results in unified access to a patient's imaging records," said Kevan Torgerson, president, McKesson Enterprise Medical Imaging & Ancillary Solutions. "Their physicians need fast access to data and the ability to communicate with one another in real-time. Having access to the right information at the right time will help MLH to achieve better business performance and provide even better care to patients throughout its growing community."