GE Healthcare brings decision support to patient bedside

GE Healthcare is taking the next step step beyond Electronic Medical Records (EMR) by integrating it with advice on what a doctor should do, at the patient’s bedside.

GE has its new “clinical knowledge platform,” dubbed Qualibria which was introduced at a small press breakfast during the HIMSS trade show.

The development partner was Intermountain Healthcare, a Salt Lake City, Utah company that both offers health care plans and runs hospitals. This gives it an incentive to do cost effective care. A recent Dartmouth study said $40 billion could be saved a year by moving to the procedures Intermountain practices.

Those procedures, along with coding, research and decision support tools, are now at the patient’s bedside with Qualibria, which is “EMR agnostic” and so can ride above the systems hospitals have already installed.

“The secret sauce is not only the clinical quality of Intermountain but the presentation of that knowledge,” said Dr. Graham Hughes, chief medical officer for GE’s Healthcare’s Enterprise IT Systems division.

The resulting system provides control over data, outcomes and process. Doctors can be told what should be done, in an emergency, along with an alarm. This saves lives and money.

“Costs are out of control because we’re not doing the right thing,” said Intermountain CIO Mark Probst. And if your hospital doesn’t like Intermountain, GE is also taking Informatics and clinical expertise from thne Mayo Clinic.

The system is highly customizable, of course, so if a hospital uses different terms or has different processes, the system will use that language and enforce those policies.

Qualibria also manages data so everything a hospital does becomes part of an ongoing clinical trial. Hospitals can mine their own data and do continuous evaluations.

The representation model is not being kept proprietary either. Said Hughes, “Our goal is to create a standard representations so other vendors don’t have to do this again. We’re working with standards commiuttees to create an industry standard for knowledge representation out of this.”

Qualibria is by far the most important product announcement at this year’s HIMSS show. It’s one thing for a doctor to have data, quite another for them to know what to do with it. Delivering that knowledge is a real revolution.

Tags: ge healthcare