GE Healthcare IT, a leading vendor of comprehensive clinical and financial information technology solutions, today announced that Huntsville Hospital, one of the largest not-for-profit hospitals in the United States, has implemented the latest version 6.1 of GE's Centricity Enterprise Solution to integrate patients’ clinical information into one comprehensive electronic record - allowing broader access to vital data along the entire healthcare continuum.

"This is a significant step for us in evolving toward best-practice and evidence- based care processes,” said Sharon D. Davis, IT Director, Huntsville Hospital. "Physicians now have the ability of accessing the clinical record at any time, from anywhere—inside and outside the hospital."

Building on an existing Centricity Enterprise portfolio, Huntsville will benefit caregivers in its acute care and ambulatory environments and is seeking to further facilitate communications, ease workflow, speed documentation, reduce the potential for medical error, and improve efficiency across the healthcare enterprise. In addition, these solutions unite financial, administrative, and clinical data to enable healthcare organizations to create and maintain lifetime patient records.

For example, one component of Huntsville's solution – Extensive integration with ancillary systems—enables any clinician with appropriate security to access not on textural results, but also to link directly to PACS images, document images, EKG strips, ancillary procedural reports and more. Because it is tightly integrated with the other Centricity Enterprise modules, clinicians can maintain a single longitudinal patient record that can be tailored to display the information most relevant to an individual user.

"We're proud to partner with Huntsville to deliver a safe, high quality care experience to patients, while optimizing its clinical and business processes," said Laurent Rotival, Vice President and General Manager, GE Healthcare IT. "This implementation is particularly exciting as it illustrates the outstanding partnership between our technical teams and the application of our latest implementation & conversion toolsets."

ABOUT HUNTSVILLE HOSPITAL

Huntsville Hospital is one of the largest locally owned not-for-profit hospitals in the nation with 881 licensed acute care beds, serving north Alabama and southern Tennessee. As a teaching facility for the University of Alabama-Birmingham's School of Medicine and Family Practice Residency Program, Huntsville Hospital helps train family physicians for communities throughout Alabama and beyond. In addition,  the hospital serves as a primary site for more than 50 national drug research projects.

Leading its health care team is a medical staff of more than 650 highly trained physicians who are supported by 5,000 hospital employees, including nearly 2,000 nurses. Its facilities include Huntsville Hospital, Huntsville Hospital for Women and Children, an outpatient Medical Mall, Madison Medical Park, and a 70-bed rehabilitation hospital located