Southwestern Ontario Diagnostic Imaging Network Complete

Barrington, Ill.-based GE Healthcare announced the successful completion of a vendor neutral Digital Imaging Repository (DI-r) that connects hospitals and medical centers throughout Southwestern Ontario (SWO), Canada, enabling the sharing of patient health data across the region. For the first time in Ontario’s history, 26 hospital organizations in the Erie St. Clair and South West Local Health Integration Networks (LHINs) are able to share filmless diagnostic image exams between their facilities.

The archive contains approximately 2.7 million exams and grows, on average, by 120,000 new exams each month. These exams can be accessed by acute care facilities in these two LHINs, increasing healthcare providers’ access to provide timely results for patients. Clinicians also have the ability to compare images to previous scans, enhancing the quality of information at the time of diagnosis.

The vision for this ambitious project is to eventually provide some of the infrastructure for the Canada Health Infoway (CHI) and eHealth Ontario initiatives to create a pan-Province and, eventually, pan-Canadian Electronic Health Record (EHR), providing Canadian clinicians a longitudinal patient view leveraging GE’s Centricity Enterprise Archive.