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GE Healthcare and Intermountain Health Care Announce First Joint Project to Reduce Medical Errors

Posted on: Wednesday, 6 July 2005, 09:00 CDT

Announcement kicks off landmark collaboration between GE and IHC to provide the country's most wide-reaching healthcare IT 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 the organizations' first joint project aimed at preventing adverse drug events and increasing patient safety. GE and IHC will work together on the development of a new advanced electronic medication administration record, also known as an eMAR, which will better enable collaboration among a patient's care team - anyone who touches the patient and sees to their care.

Physicians, nurses and engineers from GE and IHC will work side-by-side to create the new eMAR at a joint clinical research center to be based in West Valley, Utah. The clinical information technology (IT) will incorporate hand-held devices and bar-coding technologies, and will leverage in-depth clinical patient information to automatically validate and document prescribed medications.

"Our goal in working with IHC is to provide clinical IT that will strengthen a care team's clinical decision support and, ultimately, to enhance patient care," said Vishal Wanchoo, president and CEO of GE Healthcare Information Technologies. "The new, 'intelligent' clinical eMAR we develop, which will strengthen a seamless process of physician ordering, pharmacy dispensing and nurse bed-side administration, is at the core of safe and high-quality patient care."

According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), adverse drug events result in almost 770,00 injuries and deaths annually in the United States, and cost the nation's hospitals up to $5.6 million each per year. The development of computerized monitoring systems, like eMAR, can reduce up to 95 percent of those errors, also according to AHRQ.

"The rich clinical data IHC has collected over the years combined with GE's clinical IT programs will enable clinicians to capture and learn from embedded protocols, leading to a significant reduction in medical errors," said Wanchoo. "This is the first project of our collaboration with IHC, and it will leverage the unique expertise and knowledge of both organizations, resulting in a new medication system that meets an important, unmet clinical need."

According to GE and IHC, the new clinical research center, expected to create more than 100 in-state jobs, will provide a central location for researchers to combine IHC's clinical data with GE's clinical IT programs.

"Researchers and members of the medical community will work together to create new technologies that improve upon the current system of patient monitoring and enhance patient care by reducing errors that are the result of software that can quantify data, but isn't smart enough to qualify data," said Marc Probst, IHC's chief information officer.

In February 2005, GE and IHC announced a $100 million, 10-year collaboration to enhance the patient care process in hospitals and clinics and accelerate the adoption of electronic health records among health systems in the United States. In addition, GE is providing its Centricity IT technologies across institutions within IHC's network, which serve more than 2 million patients. These installations will enable the widespread use of the new electronic pharmaceutical profile software throughout the IHC network, which is made up of 21 hospitals and 92 clinics.

"The collaboration between GE and IHC, and the research project they are announcing today, is significant and will put Utah at the forefront of efforts to enhance patient care and safety," said Utah Governor Jon M. Huntsman, Jr. "The medical implications of the project are vast, as are the benefits to Utah's economy and stature in the high technology and biotechnology industries."

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 and neurological and cardiovascular disease.

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.

Source: Business Wire

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