A campus-wide picture archiving communications system, a robust document imaging and management system and a comprehensively redesigned Web site now reside at southeast Michigan’s Garden City Hospital. 

Garden City Hospital officials expect the completion of the system upgrades, performed by the hospital’s healthcare IT service provider CareTech Solutions, will allow the hospital to provide better patient care and achieve greater levels of productivity.

“Garden City Hospital’s core mission is to provide personalized healthcare that improves the well being of our patients and the community at large, and empowering our clinicians with the best technology directly supports our ability to provide excellent care,” said Gary Ley, president and CEO of Garden City Hospital. “We place tremendous value on CareTech Solutions’ ability to understand our needs and strategically implement technology that improves our hospital, and most importantly, helps our staff to provide the best patient care possible.”

Completed in April, Garden City Hospital’s new PACS system, built by Amicas Inc., enables electronic management of and remote access to medical images in the hospital’s radiology department. A mere three months later, Garden City Hospital can boast that 75 percent of all medical images are now viewable in the hospital’s PACS and emergency room physicians can accomplish preliminary radiological examinations significantly faster than the hospital’s previous hard-copy-based system could allow.

 Implemented in June, a Web-based document imaging system, designed and built by CareTech Solutions, now securely stores, manages, retrieves and distributes Garden City Hospital’s medical, billing, payment and other clinical documents electronically. The system, called iDoc, helps to improve clinicians’ access to information and the speed and quality of patient care, while reducing costs. It also provides GCH’s authorized users instant retrieval and online document completion and signature anywhere there is Internet access.

Supporting Garden City Hospital’s goal of providing a more interactive yet simplified online experience, CareTech’s work in redesigning the hospital’s Web site (www.gchosp.org) to include its CareWorks CMS content management system now incorporates advanced functionality into the site, including a physician finder, an employment opportunity module, patient “e-greeting” cards, patient pre-registration, class registration, and an online medical-equipment store. Garden City Hospital leaders report 500 new visitors to the site per day.