NEW YORK – Continuum Health Partners in New York City will replace multiple medical imaging systems with a single integrated imaging solution aimed at streamlining the workflow and improving the productivity of more than 10,000 physicians.

Continuum will deploy the Horizon Medical Imaging picture archiving and communications system (PACS) from Atlanta-based McKesson in hospitals and clinics that perform more than one million patient exams annually in New York City.

St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center, a 1,076-bed hospital at two locations in Midtown and the Upper West Side, has employed McKesson's PACS since 1994. As part of the agreement, it will upgrade to the newest version of Horizon Medical Imaging to become the first Continuum facility to deploy the new system.

Beth Israel Medical Center, a 1,106-bed teaching hospital on Manhattan's Lower East Side and a Columbia and Albert Einstein University affiliate, and The New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, one of the oldest specialty hospitals in the world, will replace their existing PACS systems with new McKesson technology. Several radiology clinics also will make the move.

"The migration to an enterprise-scale PACS speaks to our uncompromising dedication to delivering quality patient care," said Michael Abiri, MD, chairman of the department of radiology at Continuum Health Partners, noting that multiple systems deployed through the years have created information silos and integration problems. "With this new system all our medical teams, regardless of location, will be able to focus on what they do best – providing the best patient care possible."

Currently, Continuum radiologists move from one computer station to another to view images from various PACS systems representing different locations of image acquisition. With Horizon Medical Imaging, radiologists will be able to read studies in real-time from any location, no matter where the exam is performed. The system provides access to imaging tools to view or manipulate images via the Internet.

"Our radiology IT and medical teams will no longer have to navigate three or four separate systems, and patient images will be available across any access point at any campus," said Tarek El Shayal, PACS manager for Continuum Health Partners. "Our previous configuration of multiple vendor systems simply did not give us the productivity and customer care results we strive to keep."