Statement from Sally Wild, Director of Surgical Services and Imaging

Epiphany was extremely quick with their response to us and our needs. Due to cutbacks we were in a very difficult position with our needs.  Thanks to their willingness to assist us, excellent training occurred as well as the upgrade of the system.  Thank you again for all that you did and for helping our staff and physicians feel secure and competent to use the Epiphany system.

Sally Wild
Director of Surgical Systems/Imaging
Northern Virginia Community Hospital

Background: Need to Solve Access-to-ECG Problem in Emergency Department

Mary Porter of Northern Virginia Community Hospital contacted Epiphany in November 2004 with a problem-the hospital lacked electronic ECG management.  Physicians complained about the lack of quick access to ECGs in the Emergency Department for patients presenting with cardiac symptoms.  Delays in receiving these ECGs were unacceptable for the standard of care in treating these patients.

Mary discussed this problem with her Chief Financial Officer who told her that $25,000 was available in discretionary funding to deploy an electronic ECG management system.  Research of the available ECG management systems resulted in prices from other vendors four-to-six times that amount.  Epiphany, however, with its scalable pricing, solved the problem with a single-desktop application.  Northern Virginia deployed the Epiphany application in January 2005.

Problem: Turnover in Staff and Changes in ECG Reading Requirements

Epiphany's objective in every customer relationship is customer satisfaction.  Toward this end, Epiphany regularly calls each of its customers to gauge current satisfaction.  A call to Sally Wild of Northern Virginia in December 2005 revealed significant staff turnover throughout the course of 2005.  The call also revealed the desire by physicians to access ECG data from other PCs in the enterprise.  

Neither of these problems had a capital budget for resolution.

Epiphany's Resolution: Provide an Enterprise Application and More Training at No Charge; Prepare for Future Expansion of the Application

Lacking a budget for training and an upgrade, Northern Virginia was in a predicament.  Epiphany decided to resolve the hospital's predicament by upgrading Northern Virginia to a new, web-based application at no charge.  Likewise, Epiphany performed the training for the staff on the new application at no charge.

While the Epiphany application at Northern Virginia currently integrates resting ECG, it is expandable to other modalities like stress, Holter, event monitoring, pulmonary functions testing, etc.  Epiphany takes in data from over fifty devices from thirty vendors in ten modalities.

Physicians reading ECG reports with Epiphany have full web access.  They are able, therefore, to read ECGs from anywhere in the hospital, from their offices, or from home.

Epiphany's application is compatible with Northern Virginia's MEDITECH electronic medical record.  Epiphany can receive orders from MEDITECH and post HL7 results and bills when an order is complete.  This is a project for future expansion of the Epiphany application.