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Intermountain Healthcare to Install Carecast - Now GE Centricity - As Its Foundation Electronic Medical Records (EMR) System

Posted on: Tuesday, 14 February 2006, 15:01 CST

Renowned Healthcare Provider Will Partner with GE on Rapid Roll-out of New Capabilities and Advanced Clinical Decision Support Technology

GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric Company (NYSE:GE), announced today that Intermountain Healthcare will install the IDX(R) Carecast(TM) enterprise system - now marketed as GE Centricity(R) Enterprise - across its organization, and will also serve as a strategic development partner in building advanced decision support and knowledge management tools, as well as other state-of-the art functionality for the enterprise system. Following the January 4th completion of the GE Healthcare acquisition of IDX Systems Corporation, the announcement represents a significant investment by both GE Healthcare and Intermountain in the enterprise electronic medical record system's current capabilities and future development. The partnership announcement was made yesterday during the 2006 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference & Exhibition in San Diego.

"During the past decade, electronic medical records (EMRs) have evolved from serving as repositories of information to supporting best practices at the point of care," said Vishal Wanchoo, president and CEO of GE Healthcare Integrated IT Solutions. "Through our partnership with Intermountain and ongoing collaboration with many leading healthcare organizations throughout the world, our goal is to provide a knowledge-rich, highly agile system that will be the market leader in a new generation of clinical information technology."

Intermountain is internationally known as a leader in quality patient care, including pioneering work to track, measure and improve clinical outcomes - the process of determining clinical actions that most effectively influence a patient's return to good health. For four consecutive years, Intermountain has been recognized as the number one integrated healthcare delivery network in the U.S. by the Verispan IHN (Integrated Healthcare Network) 100 survey. The survey rates integrated delivery networks on their business and clinical performance and degree of integration.

In 2005, GE Healthcare and Intermountain announced a 10-year technology development collaboration to combine Intermountain's internationally-recognized expertise in clinical informatics research with GE Healthcare's leading clinical software applications and market depth and breadth. The agreement included information systems for imaging, perioperative, PACS, pharmacy, lab and ambulatory electronic medical records.

Following the close of the GE Healthcare acquisition of IDX Systems Corporation on January 4, 2006, Intermountain expanded its collaboration with GE Healthcare to incorporate use of the Centricity Enterprise system, an integrated clinical, financial and administrative system that supports the creation of lifetime electronic patient records and is based on IDX's 25-year heritage in this field. The development partnership will also include use of the Centricity(R) Radiology Solution, a combined picture archiving communications system (PACS) solution and industry-leading radiology information system (RIS), formerly IDX(R) Imagecast(TM). Intermountain plans to use both systems across its 21 hospitals and clinics.

"Intermountain is familiar with Centricity Enterprise's strong capabilities and believes it will provide a solid, enterprise platform for accelerating our co-development work with GE Healthcare," said Marc Probst, CIO of Intermountain. "We plan to install Centricity Enterprise as our foundation electronic medical records system across our organization. Intermountain is committed to partnering with GE Healthcare to pioneer new technologies to make Centricity Enterprise the recognized industry leader for promoting patient health and preventive care."

According to Probst and Wanchoo, the development partnership will focus on both immediate enhancements to Centricity Enterprise and next generation development:

-- State of the art decision support. Intermountain is known for its pioneering use of evidence based protocols to enable its clinicians to improve both the quality and cost of patient care. For example, the organization estimates that it saves 450 lives a year through timely use of beta blockers for cardiac patients. In another notable protocol, ICU patients using ventilators can be weaned off the ventilators 24 hours earlier than the industry norm, supporting improved recovery. Intermountain assists its clinicians in practicing evidence-based medicine through providing software decision support tools that reinforce clinical protocols. Intermountain and GE Healthcare plan to expand Centricity Enterprise's decision support capabilities to encompass a broader array of interdisciplinary protocols for diverse healthcare organizations. The partnership will also enable GE Healthcare to license and sell electronic protocols developed by Intermountain for use within Centricity Enterprise.

-- Knowledge management. The organizations plan to research and develop new approaches for ensuring that clinicians can rapidly access the latest clinical findings on patient care, including seamless access to online resources and knowledge bases as well as knowledge directly embedded in the electronic medical record.

Other enhancements will center on data mining, outcomes management and user experience across the clinical disciplines. GE Healthcare and Intermountain expect that the development partnership, while introducing new, advanced capabilities to Centricity Enterprise, will also provide near-term expansion of the system's ambulatory, emergency department and critical care capabilities. A major focus of the development partnership will be enabling Centricity Enterprise to incorporate patient information from other specialty GE Healthcare systems, including the acute care, outpatient, perioperative and perinatal environments.

GE Healthcare development efforts for Centricity Enterprise will involve its major development hub for enterprise clinical information systems, located in Seattle, Washington, as well a new technology center in Salt Lake City, where approximately 100 clinicians and software experts from GE Healthcare and Intermountain will collaborate on the Centricity Enterprise system and related projects. GE Healthcare's worldwide network of information technology development sites will also support the ongoing technology development of Centricity Enterprise.

"Through the GE Healthcare development partnership with Intermountain, Centricity Enterprise's ongoing development and futures work will benefit from the technical and clinical resources of one of the nation's most respected leaders in clinical outcomes management," said Wanchoo. "However, this new strategic partnership does not diminish the need for ongoing dialogue and collaboration with all our EMR customers. We will also continue to provide customers with numerous opportunities to be early adopters of inpatient and ambulatory product offerings. We look forward to introducing powerful new functionality into GE Centricity, to further expanding collaboration with customers, and to significantly benefiting patient care."

About Intermountain Healthcare

Intermountain Healthcare is a charitable, community-owned, nonprofit health care organization based in Salt Lake City that serves the needs of Utah and Idaho residents. A central part of Intermountain's mission is to provide quality medical care to persons from the region with a medical need, regardless of ability to pay.

About GE Healthcare

GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform and treat disease, so their patients can live their lives to the fullest.

GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases, and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention.

Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $15 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE:GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 43,000 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.

Source: Business Wire

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