A Medical Device Daily

CalRHIO (San Francisco) said it has selected Medicity (Salt Lake City), teamed with Perot Systems (Plano, Texas), to build a statewide health information exchange utility service that will offer California healthcare providers electronic access to patient medical records.

Donald Holmquest, MD, president/CEO of CalRHIO, said, "Medicity and Perot Systems were selected because their solution offers a strong, proven, and scalable platform that will eliminate limitations on how individual healthcare organizations and local communities design and implement the health information exchange services they need."

Medicity and Perot Systems will assist in procuring seed money to fund start-up costs for the CalRHIO HIE utility service, including building the statewide backbone infrastructure and integration, marketing and communication, and CalRHIO's operating budget.

Financing requirements for this phase are estimated at $300 million.

The health information exchange platform is intended to make it possible for physician offices, hospitals and health plans that have invested in health information technology (HIT) to use their current technology to access data outside their walls. While details of charges are yet to be determined, the savings expected as a result of having better information will be many times greater than the cost, according to Holmquest.

CalRHIO is a statewide initiative to improve the safety and efficiency of healthcare through the use of IT and the secure exchange of health information.

In other contract news: ScImage (Los Altos, California), an enterprise imaging and information management company, said the Veteran's Health Administration has awarded the contract for the VHA's nationwide teleradiology program serving more than 150 VHA Medical Centers.

The ScImage solution, PicomEnterpise, will be deployed as a web layer on top of disparate PACS at various facilities to route exams along with prior images and reports based on dynamic business rules and will be used exclusively in the VHA's Teleradiology Center to provide a virtual reading environment for reading radiologists and/or radiology groups.

ScImage said that deploying the solution in this manner will enable the VHA to surmount shortage of qualified staff in certain geographies, provide faster turnaround and offer a more unified and consistent collaborative reading workflow that VHA program directors can watch and manage very closely from anywhere.

PicomEnterprise features one database and a shared infrastructure that simplifies workflow for multiple facilities. It features time saving clinical applications for TelePACS over broadband infrastructure.