IBM recently announced that the new Bulgarian multi-specialty UniHospital, opened in June, is innovating in patient care via a private cloud based electronic health record services delivered to physicians and patients through a fully integrated and digitized IT infrastructure.

Panagyurishte, a town located in a mining area from Pazardzhik Province – Southern Bulgaria, is famous for his gold Thracian treasure, discovered in 1949. Now, the city is famous for UniHospital, the biggest healthcare investment in Bulgaria in the last 25 years. Evaluated at more than EUR 45 million, the hospital project is based on 310-bed facility features 27 clinics and diagnostic centers with more than 700 staff. The digital hospital is hosting the latest technologies in surgery, imaging, laboratory and electronic medical records, including next generation medical multimodal linear accelerators and a robotic digital subtraction angiography system within a hybrid operating room, unique for the region of South East Europe. Eleven separate and fully functional medical systems handle the entire medical process.

IBM has designed and together with other vendors has implemented a solution, which is the first of its kind deployed in Bulgaria. It connects hospital’s medical systems and brings data from disparate applications and equipment together to offer a real-time view of patient’s condition via a web portal. All patient records, MRI scans and other medical applications are hosted onto a single datacenter, significantly speeding up the full cycle – from the right diagnosis to the right treatment.

“IBM solutions working in UniHospital are a real proof point that the first step towards an intelligent and effective healthcare begins with the digitalization of the entire medical process,” says Dr. Lucia Dobreva, Director of UniHospital. “Our hospital hosts world’s top medical and imaging equipment, however its value can be fully harnessed only when the design and the performance of the IT infrastructure match that quality. This is a fact at UniHospital and today, for example, our microbiology laboratory can localize an infectious agent within just five minutes, after which doctors can analyze full patient picture to identify the right treatment in less than six hours –a process that in other facilities may take up to three days.”

Today, UniHospital is the first healthcare project in Bulgaria and in South East Europe which enable simultaneous use of medical imaging during surgery or other invasive manipulations. Its IT infrastructure has the handling capacity for huge amounts of data. A 15 GB PET-CT scan, for example, is being generated in just a couple of minutes and in very short time can be shared across all hospital’s clinics and directly displayed in the surgery room.

“Since the first agreement signed last year, IBM has been delivering a full end-to-end healthcare development roadmap to UniHospital, covering a wide range of healthcare services – from basic hospital operations, imaging and lab services, patient clinical information, to integration of medical systems, data analytics, and discussions about cognitive healthcare,” says Igor Pravica, Country Leader, IBM Bulgaria.

IBM solution enabled new levels of uptime and stability, increased agility, faster and better patient services and greater operational efficiency. In the long run the IT infrastructure can be further developed to help UniHospital cull insight from swelling volumes of patient data and provide it easily to doctors, nurses, clinical laboratories and other healthcare institutions.

Source: IBM Blogs SE Europe