GE’s recent healthymagination thought leadership summit on hospital efficiency took an in-depth look at how medicine is being transformed by measurable new ways to standardize care, reduce errors, and manage critical hospital equipment — and staff — more efficiently. Those changes underway — and the hurdles that doctors and hospital administrators still face in implementing them — are the subject of a new five-part interactive feature, “Healthy Hospitals,” on GE.com. It ranges from videos of hospital staffers who have to juggle operating rooms and equipment use in high-stress environments to the video game, pictured below, that let’s you see just how good (or bad) you might be at trying to alleviate the more than four hours that patients end up waiting on average in an emergency room visit.
 Do the Patient Shuffle: Clicking on the image takes you to the game on GE.com. As blog econsultancy.com notes: “The game is cute, fun and frustrating. If you start playing, you’ll soon learn that your reflexes aren’t fast enough to accommodate all of the patients who enter the waiting room and get them treated within the required time. As the game helpfully points out afterward, ‘imagine if this were your real job.’” |
When it comes to hospital efficiency, two success stories are New Orleans-based Ochsner Health System, which is the largest private healthcare system in the Gulf Coast region, and Virtua Health, in New Jersey. As GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt recently wrote in a letter to shareholders about GE’s work with them to increase efficiency, “Over the last decade, we’ve gone beyond supplying them diagnostic imaging equipment. We work just as hard on quality, leadership and productivity solutions. We’ve helped make Ochsner and Virtua two of the highest-quality and most cost-efficient health systems in the country.” Next week GE Reports will take a closer look at Ochsner’s work as their medical team marks the five-year anniversary of devastating Hurricane Katrina and the role they played providing assistance.
In the video below, which is also part of the “Healthy Hospitals” interactive feature, Kunter Akbay, a principle engineer at GE Global Research, which is the technology development hub for all of GE’s businesses, explains how his team is developing technologies to increase efficiency at hospitals such as Ochsner. Kunter says they are focusing on simulation modeling to look at hospital design; new technologies that help spot early warnings for trouble spots such as bed shortages; and systems that integrate sensors to help staff know if safety protocols were followed.
 Smarter hospitals: Click on the image to view the video on GE.com. |
One of the technologies at the heart of making hospitals more efficient is electronic medical records, or EMRs. As the graphic below from the feature shows, the gains are measurable. For example, it’s estimated that the percentage of a medical appointment that a health worker spends filling out forms and collecting data from a patient drops from 32 percent to 16 percent with EMRs.
 Paper tiger: Click on the image to enlarge it.. |
Learn more in these GE Reports stories:
* “Helping fix hospitals so they can better fix patients”
* “IDEO’s Tim Brown on ‘design thinking’ in healthcare”
* “Visualizing health with The Economist Intelligence Unit”
* “Spotting data disconnects with Health of Nations index”
* “GE systems boost cancer center case capacity by 900”
* “Inside the revolution at Intermountain Healthcare”
* “How an affinity for efficiency saved Virtua Health $25M”
