Shore Memorial is the only local hospital offering a clinical affiliation with the University of Pennsylvania Health System. Through this affiliation, cardiologists from PENN Cardiac Care at University of Pennsylvania Medical Center-Presbyterian provide diagnostic catheterization services on-site in Shore Memorial™s recently opened CardioVascular Institute (CVI).
The CVI is located on the hospital™s second floor. An $8.5 million Institute, it includes some of the most advanced technology available and a team of nurses, technologists, cardiologists, radiologists and vascular surgeons selected for their specific experience and expertise in cardiac care.

The vast majority of the Institute™s patients come for stress tests, echocardiograms and electrocardiograms, although the Institute also performs cardiac catheterizations. Harvey Waxman, MD, Presbyterian™s Chief of Cardiology, serves as medical director for the Institute™s low-risk cardiac catheterization laboratory, and Gina Preston is administrative director.
Gina notes, It was very important to us to introduce a system that would smoothly integrate with non-invasive cardiac studies. Since we had just purchased a Siemens PACS system, integration between that radiology system and the new system for cardiology and vascular studies was another determining factor.

Shore Memorial installed a complete suite of clinical information system (CIS) components, including Medcon™s Cath Report, Echo Report and Vascular Report. TCS Symphony reporting tools have what™s called On-Image Reporting, where physicians and technologists point and click their diagnostics directly on the image. Shore Memorial also installed MDWeb to enable physicians to review cases from remote locations over the Internet. The hospital™s future plans include full reporting over the web, further supporting a paperless workflow.

With the new system, orders data is automatically sent to modalities, eliminating duplicate data entry on the modality. HemoLink, an inbound hemodynamics data interface, includes a data mapping engine that auto-populates most of the final cath report when requested. MDEchoLink imports all echo and vascular measurements performed on ultrasound machines. The outbound results interface allows final reports to be exported back to the Cerner HIS for inclusion in the central Electronic Medical Record (EMR). This feature ensures access to all patient data from one central location, using any workstation running the HIS.

Pre-set customized queries can also be applied to the TCS Symphony database to facilitate administrative operations and clinical research. Queries are built with a visual query builder. Data is exported into formatted reports or Excel spreadsheets for statistical processing.

The integration between cardiology studies and the HIS is a tremendous benefit for referring and consulting cardiologists, says Kathy Pugliese RN, CVI Nurse Manager. The perfect example is when a patient arrives at the emergency room at 2 am with chest pain. The cath lab report created six months earlier is immediately pulled up and the attending physician has on-the-spot access to all the relevant data.

Gina Preston can be reached at GPreston@shorememorial.org