GE Healthcare and Intermountain Health Care Announce Collaboration to Provide Country’s Most Wide-Reaching Healthcare Information Technologies System
GE Healthcare, a division of General Electric Company (NYSE:GE), and Intermountain Health Care (IHC), the nation’s top integrated health care system, today announced a collaboration to create a best-practices based clinical software program that will enhance the patient care process in hospitals and clinics and accelerate the adoption of electronic health records (EHR) among health systems in the United States.
The collaboration was announced today in Dallas at the annual meeting of Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS), the industry’s largest healthcare information technologies (IT) trade show.
According to Vishal Wanchoo, president and CEO of GE Healthcare Information Technologies, this software program will serve as a building block for the country’s most wide-reaching healthcare IT system.
“The collaboration between GE and IHC is intended to spur the development of a comprehensive way to manage the explosion of data that has emerged from the healthcare industry,” said Wanchoo. “Our work together has the potential to do for healthcare what the Internet did for research – information will no longer be tied to a physical location, like in a book or at a local library, but will be available in seconds on a computer, to anyone anywhere.”
“Bottom line: the strength of IHC’s proven clinical knowledge combined with the GE’s tools and global scope has the potential to transform the way healthcare is delivered,” said Wanchoo.
GE and IHC Working Together to Transform the Delivery of Healthcare
It is expected that GE and IHC team members will work together from Salt Lake City to research and develop significant advances to GE’s Centricity software IT platform. The new best-practices based clinical software system will include IHC’s clinical decision-making abilities and will be based on current and emerging open healthcare standards.
GE also intends to provide Centricity technologies for departments – including pharmacy, computerized physician order entry (CPOE) and cardiology – across institutions within IHC’s network, which includes 92 clinics/physician offices and 21 hospitals in Utah and Idaho, serving more than 2 million patients. These installations, which will facilitate the sharing of patient information throughout IHC’s network, will begin shortly and continue over the next five years.
“GE and IHC will work together to develop an IT system that simplifies healthcare’s current approach to clinical information systems by ensuring all facilities – regardless of where they are located – have the most comprehensive and coordinated access to clinical data, resulting in faster diagnosis and more effective patient care,” said Greg Poulsen, IHC’s senior vice president.
Ultimately, the collaboration between GE and IHC is intended to enhance and equalize patient care, according to Poulsen.
“Through improved access to EHRs and decision support, local hospitals in rural areas have the same access to patient information, best-practice models, and research as larger hospitals in urban areas,” said Poulsen. “For example, the EHRs of a child treated at a local hospital in a small town in Utah can be accessed by experts at the Primary Children’s Medical Center in Salt Lake City, who can provide counsel on the best course of treatment after viewing their medical history and test results via IHC’s software program.”
“In healthcare, timely access to information is the great equalizer. GE and IHC want to make the most progressive research and modern tools of diagnosis and treatment available to everyone” said Poulsen.
Combined Capabilities to Jumpstart Establishment of Interoperable EHRs
GE’s Centricity software will form the backbone of the envisioned digital healthcare solution as a complete package of workflow automation, clinical documentation, decision support, and quality assurance tools that makes the computer-based patient record a reality by integrating information from patient monitors, diagnostic imaging systems and other ancillary hospital information systems into a centralized clinical date repository.
IHC’s software drives clinical programs that are recognized for helping caregivers provide some of the best outcomes for patients in hospital and clinic settings. Documented clinical outcomes assist doctors with decision-making and patient care.
“What will be unique about our collaboration is that IHC physicians, nurses and clinicians will provide clinical knowledge that GE’s engineers will put in their company’s IT format to use across the country,” said Dr. Brandon Savage, general manager, Enterprise Systems, GE Healthcare. “The design will actually be directed by those who work in the field and will use this technology everyday.”
In 2004, President George W. Bush called for interoperable EHRs for all United States citizens within the next decade. However, without a nationally and accepted approach and procedures in place, transferring patient information across healthcare systems and networks isn’t feasible, according to Wanchoo.
“By enabling the integration of our country’s clinical IT systems, we will streamline healthcare costs, reduce medical errors and enhance the quality of patient care,” said Wanchoo.
According to Poulsen, the evolution of clinical information technologies in healthcare is just beginning, which makes it an opportune time for this collaboration.
“Less that 15 percent of the health care providers in developed countries like the United States, Canada and Western Europe have adopted clinical IT systems,” said Poulsen. “Because of such a low level of penetration, GE and IHC view this as an opportunity to set the standard for the industry to follow.”
About GE Healthcare
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies that will shape a new age of patient care. GE Healthcare’s expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, disease research, drug discovery and biopharmaceuticals is dedicated to detecting disease earlier and tailoring treatment for individual patients. GE Healthcare offers a broad range of services to improve productivity in healthcare and enable healthcare providers to better diagnose, treat and manage patients with conditions such as cancer, Alzheimer’s and cardiovascular diseases.
GE Healthcare is a $14 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE:GE) that is headquartered in the United Kingdom. Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 42,500 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at www.gehealthcare.com .
About Intermountain Health Care
IHC is a charitable, community-owned, nonprofit health care organization based in Salt Lake City that has served the needs of Utah and Idaho residents for the past 30 years. The IHC system includes health insurance plans, 21 hospitals, nearly 100 clinics and practices, a physician group and affiliated physicians. Last year, in more than 150,000 cases, IHC hospitals and associated clinics provided $67 million in charitable assistance. A central part of IHC’s mission is to provide quality medical care to persons from the Intermountain region with a medical need, regardless of ability to pay. IHC was recently named the nations number one integrated health network by Verispan, a research firm headquartered in Yardley, Pennsylvania. IHC has been ranked number one in each of the last four years, as well as in 2000. For more information about IHC, visit www.ihc.com .
