St. Luke's University Health Network is a non-profit, fully integrated, nationally recognized network that provides services at seven hospitals and more than 200 sites throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey. With over 61,000 annual patient admissions, 1,341 physicians, and 229,000 annual emergency room visits, medical image exchange throughout the wide network is an enormous part of successful data management and patient care at St. Luke's.
As an institution focused on innovation, St. Luke's looks towards technology as a method of empowering patients to take control of their own healthcare and to actively provide higher quality care as healthcare costs rise.
Chad Brisendine, Chief Information Officer at St Luke's University Health Network, said, "When looking for cloud image management vendors, it was very important to us that the organization had worked with enterprise systems before. Ambra was a best-of-breed cloud image management vendor and had the experience that we were looking for."
Historically, medical images had been provided to patients and referring physicians on CDs – a costly and time-consuming process as patients needed to schedule a pick-time for their images and travel in-person to the patient records office. In addition, with the rise of 3D mammography, DVD copies, which can take well over an hour to create, added to patient wait time and higher costs for the facility.
Today, with Ambra Health, CDs and DVDs are being phased out and medical image upload time through the cloud takes less than three minutes. Secure, electronic sharing of images provides a simple alternative to image distribution via CD and offers significant benefits to both care providers and patients. Once a patient shares medical images with St. Luke's, they are given the ability to create an account to store medical images in a personal health record.
Ambra's image sharing and automated routing capabilities transform efficiency and the speed of image transfer in trauma situations, second opinion collaboration, and referrals as well as enabling patient uploads.
In trauma and critical care situations, Ambra Health has greatly sped time-to-care delivery by sending imaging through the web and enabling life-saving data to be in a physician's hands even before the patient arrives.
St. Luke's joins Boston Children's Hospital, San Diego Health Connect HIE and more than 750 other healthcare providers sharing images using the Ambra Health network today, resulting in over 750,000 user logins per month from across more than 50 countries worldwide.
Founded in 1872, St. Luke's University Health Network (SLUHN) is a non-profit, regional, fully integrated and nationally recognized network providing services at seven hospitals and more than 270 outpatient sites.
The network's service area includes Lehigh, Northampton, Carbon, Schuylkill, Bucks, Montgomery, Berks and Monroe counties in Pennsylvania and in Warren County in New Jersey.
