TeraMedica Begins Implementing Evercore HIE To Service Seven Million Citizens

TeraMedica’s Evercore Creating Large-Scale Health Imaging Exchange (HIE) Abroad

TeraMedica, Inc. announces New South Wales (NSW) Health, in Australia, has successfully completed the first phase of implementation for TeraMedica's Evercore HIE Solution. With TeraMedica’s Evercore Enterprise Vendor Neutral Architecture (VNA) as the framework for the project, the Health Imaging Exchange began production use in February 2012 across twelve hospitals, serving a portion of the Sydney area. This large-scale HIE deployment includes regional geographic connections that will serve a population of more than seven million people. This HIE will eventually connect nearly 110 clinical facilities, each using their own PACS, RIS, EMR, clinical and business practices, and patient identifiers.

“NSW Health is a truly unique statewide health imaging exchange when it comes to scalable, vendor neutral architecture,” said Jim Prekop, TeraMedica President and CEO. “We are extremely pleased to provide our patient-centered clinical imaging management and distribution solution, Evercore HIE, to provide a direct and positive impact on the quality of patient care while simultaneously reducing NSW Health’s total cost of operations.”

“By utilizing Evercore’s standards-based universal image distribution system, NSW Health should see immediate improvements in patient care throughout its remote regions. Moreover, NSW Health will realize increased efficiency, accuracy and patient satisfaction leading to decreases in time, manual labor and disparate system costs across a wide geography,” said Greg Strowig, Vice President of Client Services.

The NSW Health consists of more than 110 clinical facilities and numerous disparate imaging systems across an area larger than the state of Texas. The concept of one consolidated patient-centric imaging folder, incorporating DICOM and other vital clinical content (beyond DICOM), is an innovative solution designed to provide improved care wherever the patient may be located. In all, the HIE will connect 9 PACS systems, processing over 3 million annual imaging procedures.

TeraMedica’s vendor neutral architecture lays the groundwork to give NSW Health true control of its imaging future. Additionally, Evercore HIE will provide an eventual gateway to the national government’s master patient index and the ability to provide complete electronic medical records across Australia.

Evercore integrates and manages patient-centric clinical content in the clinical and research settings across wide geographies, including standard DICOM objects. Evercore also possesses the ability to natively manage and distribute beyond DICOM using global standards such as MPG, JPG, PDF and many other critical clinical content such as treatment plans for cancer care or vital reports in non-standard formats. In conjunction with its universal viewer known as Univision, the remote physician gains access to a truly universal view of all content.

Strowig also commented, “NSW Health, and the healthcare IT world in general, face significant data integration challenges in the delivery of meaningful use and patient-centered healthcare. Evercore’s web services architecture provides the ability to efficiently combine disparate clinical objects in a central clinical content manager, satisfying the medical team’s need for a holistic view of patient data in real time.”

About TeraMedica Inc.
TeraMedica, Inc., a global healthcare informatics company based in Milwaukee, WI, is the leading provider of vendor neutral, enterprise-wide solutions for unrestricted medical image management. The company began with the successful development of a cross-departmental, patient-centric clinical image archive for the Mayo Clinic in 2001. To date, TeraMedica has over 600 customer-driven deployments on six continents. Such flexibility can only be achieved by an organization that is committed to exceeding customer expectations using a technology platform that has been designed for adaptation. For more information, visit visit www.Teramedica.com.