An Open Solution to Enhance Patient Care
Challenge: The team at NGHS was interested in transitioning from their previous supplier to the Philips PageWriter TC70 cardiograph because of its expanded functionality and reliability. A key requirement was to have the cardiographs interface seamlessly with their current non-Philips ECG management system.
Enhancing clinical workflow
The NGHS Medical Center performs approximately 200 ECGs each day, with a cardiology department that runs 24/7. Currently, five cardiographs are from Philips, with eight others supplied by another manufacturer. Ashley Dale, EKG Supervisor says, “The Philips carts are stationed in our most critical areas because of the Acute MI Critical Values function.”
The team is seeing how incorporating modality worklist with the PageWriter TC70 cardiographs is enhancing patient care. Dale notes, “It has helped us get more timely EKG information, which in turn leads to more timely interpretation by the physician. We’re able to get to the patient faster, get the information in faster, perform the EKG and then automatically link with the information in the ECG system, which saves us time in performing the EKG and saves our physicians time when reading it.”
Brittney Nix, Cardiovascular Systems Administrator, explains how easy it is to work with the updated solution with the PageWriter TC70, ECG Gateway, and the existing non-Philips ECG system. “User functionality really is as easy as 1-2-3. Once the EKG has been completed for a particular patient, it will fall off the worklist, which is very, very helpful because it means that our end users – the staff – see only open orders and active orders.”
Dale explains, “This is really important because it prevents us from doing duplicate EKGs on the same patient because that worklist is automatically updating as the tests are done.”
“We’ve been working with Philips for awhile. The solution has been very reliable, which in turn helped us a lot with our patient care, by making sure we have the equipment we need to provide the great customer care that we provide, as well as being able to implement new things.”
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