Partners HealthCare will be consolidating 19 separate pathology systems at six-hospital based programs to seven pathology systems. Six of the Partners hospitals will consolidate lab operations on a single enterprise system from Tucson, Ariz.-based Sunquest Information System.
Partners HealthCare, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School founded by Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, is recognized as a national leader in biomedical research.
Partners and Sunquest are currently in year five of a 10-year collaboration and co-development agreement to enhance the anatomic pathology and laboratory information systems and workflows.
[See also: Partners makes big interoperability push.]
"Partners has a history of collaboration with Sunquest, including the development of specimen routing and call-back clinical lab modules in the late 1990s and more recently the anatomical specimen routing module," said Jim Noga, Partners HealthCare vice president and CIO, in a news release. "The Sunquest platforms support an enterprise data flow and integration that all our labs can leverage but still allow for specific workflows and instrumentation in each laboratory."
Three sites will consolidate Partners anatomic pathology operations to Sunquest CoPathPlus and two sites will consolidate on Sunquest PowerPath. In addition, three of the sites will move to Sunquest Blood Bank. All of the sites will be utilizing Sunquest Collection Manager, Sunquest CallBack, GenLab, SMART and Microbiology modules.
[See also: Partners keeps tabs on patients at home.]
As Sunquest executives see it, the work with Partners helps the company improve its offerings.
"With help from our clients, such as Partners HealthCare, we are able to better develop our products to meet the current and future needs of these progressive organizations," said Sunquest Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing Lisa Conley, in a press statement. "Our innovation and success is based on the cooperative efforts of the Sunquest team and its clients, bringing information solutions that first and foremost improve patient safety through reduced medical errors, as well as integrating laboratory data with the healthcare record, and streamlining operational efficiencies."
