Children's Hospital chooses Camtronics for cardiology IT system

Hartland, Wis. —The Columbus Children's Hospital announced on Tuesday that they have signed an agreement with Camtronics Medical Systems Ltd. to purchase the information system CardioIMS. The system will be implemented in the Columbus Children's Heart Center, which addresses the needs of children and adults with hereditary heart defects.

The choice was based on an in-depth study of the Center's administrative and clinical needs, looking specifically at the issue of access to patient records. For the system to be feasible it needed to integrate with the information services already offered by the hospital, including ADT, scheduling and billing, and orders from CPOE. On a technical point of view, it needed to handle the imaging systems already in place for echocardiography, ECG, and pathology.

“We wanted to gain a single point of entry to all patient information within the hospital, without adding another layer of administration or another software solution onto the hospital's IT infrastructure,” said Eric Vaughn, vice president of the CCHC. “CardioIMS allows us to access patient information from our existing cardiology systems—systems we were not prepared or financially able to replace.”

The CardioIMS is a browser-based information system that provides access to a database of information, including images, diagnoses, test results and medications. With this database, physicians are able to directly work on scheduling, clinical and administrative reporting, document distribution, patient tracking, and hospital billing reports.

To evaluate CardioIMS's feasibility in CCH, representatives worked with Camtronics EchoIMS image management program fortwo years, and studied the system's use in the Texas Children's Hospital in Houston and the Cincinnati Children's Hospital in Ohio. “[We] wanted to see CardioIMS in operation,” said Craig Fleishman, MD, medical director of Cardiology Information Services at CCH. “The opportunity to see the system in use and talk to current clinical users validated our impression that CardioIMS is ideally suited to support the workflow of our heart center.”

Camtronics has also taken steps to coordinate with the CCH system, by providing documents which detailed the system's functionality and a plan for installation into the current system. Even before the agreement was signed, Camtronics completed an installation where the modality systems of the CardioIMS would connect through URL access and HL-7 interfaces

The hospital's staff welcomed the attention to detail. “This gave us a high degree of confidence in the rapid implementation and successful deployment of CardioIMS within the Children's Heart Center,” said Kelly Graf, CCH Senior Information Services Project Manager.

Columbus Children's Hospital is a healthcare network that provides wellness, preventive, diagnostic, treatment and rehabilitative care for infants, children, adolescents, and selected adult patients. Camtronics Medical Systems, Ltd., a subsidiary of Analogic Corporation headquartered in Hartland, Wisconsin was founded in 1986 and develops cardiovascular information management and hemodynamic monitoring technologies.