UNIVERSITY HEALTH NETWORK ORDERS HEARTLAB'S ENCOMPASS DIGITAL ECHO LAB SOLUTION

Canada's largest acute-care patient treatment center is one of the busiest echocardiography sites in North America

• Press release
• WESTERLY, RI
• June 05, 2002 13:42

Heartlab, Inc. today announced that University Health Network has ordered the firm's EncompassÔ

Heartlab, Inc. today announced that University Health Network has ordered the firm's EncompassÔ Digital Echo Lab Solution to meet the institution's echocardiographic imaging and data management needs. University Health Network is Canada's largest acute-care patient treatment center and performs more than 16,000 echo exams annually, making it one of the busiest echocardiography sites in North America. University Health Network, one of Canada's largest academic health science centers, includes Toronto General, Toronto Western and Princess Margaret hospitals.

Heartlab's Encompass connects to all major cardiac x-ray and ultrasound systems using the industry-standard DICOM communications protocol, creating a central repository of digital images from multiple modalities together with the associated physician findings reports. Heartlab's networks currently are installed in more than 135 leading heart centers, and the company's cardiac archiving systems manage a volume of more than 900,000 patient cases with an installed DVD-R storage capacity of 1,800,000 exams. This is the first time a hospital has ordered the Heartlab solution for echo only.

"After extensive on-site evaluations and visits to other installed sites of Digital Lab solutions from various vendors, Heartlab's Encompass system was chosen by University Health Network on the basis of system performance, scalability, open architecture and ease of use of the system," according to Sam Siu, MD, Director of Echocardiography at University Health Network.

University Health Network has 18 cardiac ultrasound machines at two sites (Toronto General and Toronto Western Hospitals) that will be linked through the Encompass system. Using Heartlab's network-connected diagnostic review stations, clinicians at both sites can have instantaneous access to several thousand diagnostic echocardiography cases stored on the Encompass Enterprise Server, and access, in less than 30 seconds, to cases stored on the Encompass DVD Image Archive. In addition, secure LAN, WAN and Internet access is also available so clinicians can reference patient data from any PC with a Web browser.

The Encompass Report system for echocardiography provides a seamlessly integrated clinical results reporting system, based on the American Society of Echocardiography (ASE) recommendations for echo report elements.

Heartlab's DVD archive is ten times faster than competing technologies, with scaleable capacity to store from 5,000 to more than 100,000 cardiac cases on site. In addition, by eliminating the costs associated with film processing, storage and retrieval, the filmless Encompass system helps hospitals to realize significant savings in their annual operating costs.