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Emerald integrates Practice Partner, Radiology PACS by Kristi Adams Emerald Communications and Training Committee  During the December holidays, MUSC’s Electronic Medical Record took a stride forward with the completion of two significant integration projects.   Practice Partner from Physician Micro Systems Inc. (PMSI) and the Radiology PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System) from Agfa were added to the list of major clinical applications that contribute and share patient data with Oacis. Practice Partner is an ambulatory care patient record system first used by family medicine physicians and smaller health care providers as a tool to combine and share medical record information.  In 1995, MUSC joined with the Department of Family Medicine, the Center for Health Care Research, and Physician Micro Systems Inc., to collaborate on networking patient information between the family physicians and the hospital.  “While clinicians have always been able to view inpatient notes in Oacis, the integration with Practice Partner will allow clinicians to also view the ambulatory care clinic notes. These additional notes contain a wealth of patient information including treatments, allergies, problem lists, and medications,”  said Mark Daniels, CCIT.  Previously obtaining a patient’s clinic notes from the family physician or other clinic required a paper request to either Medical Records or the patient’s clinic or primary care facility to retrieve the paper chart copy. This new implementation eliminates the step of contacting Medical Records and requesting a paper copy of the notes from the patient’s chart. This in turn will save clinician hours of valuable time. Another benefit to this addition is that Oacis users will have access to these notes without having to use Practice Partner, a separate application that requires additional licenses as more users are added.  There are many clinicians who only need to view the notes, but do not need all the other features of the Practice Partner system. When a doctor creates and electronically signs a note in Practice Partner, that note will become immediately available in Oacis.  “The end result here is an integrated record that includes information from both the out-patient and in-patient records,” said UMA’s Tasia Walsh, one of many who worked to make this possible.  Notes, beginning from January, are now accessible through this addition.  Family Medicine’s notes started flowing through Oacis in mid-February. A clinician can still log directly into PMSI for historical clinic notes. “Practice Partner is being used in the Internal Medicine Primary Care clinics, UDC, and APCC; Women’s Services, including East Cooper Women’s Health, 30Bee Street, and McClellan-Banks; Pediatric Primary Care, Pediatric Endocrinology, Pediatric Development, Pediatric Genetics, and Pediatric High Risk; OPAC, Plastic Surgery, Neuro-surgery, Endocrinology, Podiatry, and Hyper-tension. It is also utilized by Pharmacy Doctors, Social Workers, and Dietary,” said Jim Smith, Ambulatory Care. The second new integration into Oacis was with the Agfa PACS system, used by the Department of Radiology. This extended functionality builds on existing communications between the PACS, IDXRad and Oacis applications.  Before December an Oacis user could view the radiologist’s transcribed notes (indications and impressions) as sent from IDXRad, the Radiology Information System—a text description of the image. Today, users are able to view the PACS images simply by clicking on a button in Oacis. This launches a form that queries the PACS system and retrieves the digital image for display. The PACS image displayed through Oacis applies to only the currently selected study (i.e., the radiology report being viewed). Clinicians who want to compare images side-by-side will still need to login to Web1000 and select multiple images for review.  Currently images are accessible to Oacis for approximately six months. Radiology is working in conjunction with CCIT to extend this time frame. It is important to understand that images presented within Oacis are for informational use and are not of diagnostic quality.  The access of these images, like all other patient information in Oacis, is recorded in an audit log.  The process of moving forward in medical technology is continuous. These two achievements add to the efforts that continue to put MUSC ahead in hospital research and capabilities.   Catalyst Online is published weekly, updated as needed and improved from time to time by the MUSC Office of Public Relations for the faculty, employees and students of the Medical University of South Carolina. Catalyst Online editor, Kim Draughn, can be reached at 792-4107 or by email, catalyst@musc.edu. Editorial copy can be submitted to Catalyst Online and to The Catalyst in print by fax, 792-6723, or by email to petersnd@musc.edu or catalyst@musc.edu. To place an ad in The Catalyst hardcopy, call Community Press at 849-1778.