On Thursday, GE Healthcare unveiled its plan to reduce patient CT radiation dose by up to 50 percent, hot on the heels of recent media hype surrounding the potential radiation exposure risk CT scans pose to patients.

DOTmed News was in attendance at the Lake Success, N.Y.-based North Shore Long Island Jewish Health System's Center for Advanced Medicine -- former home of the United Nations -- as the company revealed its comprehensive new program, called the GE Blueprint for low-dose imaging.

"The Blueprint is all about taking a programmatic approach," Kenneth Denison, an executive for CT Low Dose Strategy Healthcare Systems at GE, told DOTmed News. "It's about people, process and technology combining to continue to drive CT dose lower and lower."

[Watch an exclusive DOTmed News video of the event here.]

The company plans to work with hundreds of physicians and health systems that represent 3,500 hospitals with 70-80 percent of the total patient admissions for the U.S., developing system-specific solutions at no charge.

Nationwide hospital outreach and GE commitment builds on $800 million investment in low-dose solutions over 15 years.

"I think it's important that all imaging is effective and high quality and it's a fantastic, rich technology that can impact both outcomes and costs," GE Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt said at Thursday's press conference.

The Blueprint model
As part of their blueprint, North Shore-LIJ is incorporating 16 new advanced GE CT systems and low-dose technologies, including: Veo; DoseWatch, a first-of-its-kind management tool that helps providers measure, track and optimize patient dose over time; and ASiR low-dose image reconstruction technology.

GE's Blueprint will follow North Shore-LIJ's model, which The Joint Commission's president, Mark Chassin, "saluted" in a statement on Thursday for "safely adopting new technology and making sure it operates appropriately and delivers lower doses of radiation."

Using a so-called "Low Dose Architects" team, GE Blueprint would set up dose management programs, including staff education, process improvements, equipment assessments and training of CT technologies that can enable low-dose, high-definition imaging.

"The Low Dose Architects will work with health systems to understand where they are relative to the better programs that are out there today and then how they get from where they are to continuously lowering dose and reducing patient exposure," said Denison.

North Shore-LIJ president and CEO Michael Dowling said that when pursuing such an initiative, more important than the equipment itself is being able to partner with a vendor.

"We believe that this was the best partnership and the best collaboration," he said. "And [GE is made up of] forward-thinking innovators and experts in imaging technology, so we are delighted to have this relationship."

GE has a 30-year history of advancements in CT imaging that help lower dose. This culminated last year when the company announced its Veo product -- what GE says is the world's first model-based iterative reconstruction technique. With this technology, physicians have achieved chest CT exams that have a dose as low as a chest X-ray, according to Denison. The images use less than 1 millisievert (mSV) of radiation dose.

"[1 mSV] is about the same amount of radiation you would get living in the environment from background sources -- your television, the basement, the sun -- for 90 days," Steven Gray, vice president and general manager for GE's global computed tomography and advantage workstation, told DOTmed News. "So we think at that level, it's a huge improvement."

In comparison, traditional chest CT scans can expose patients to anywhere from 5 mSv to 10 mSv of radiation dose, and natural background radiation exposes the average American to around 3 mSv per year.

"[GE's new technology] is much more expensive and much more computer-intensive and it takes a little longer to reconstruct images, but this technology really breaks the paradigm of being able to image at low doses and get exceptional image quality," said Gray.

Do patient fears equal less CT utilization?
But even with these improvements, have patients -- now more knowledgeable about the modality and its potential risks -- been turned off of CT scans altogether? Dr. John Pellerito, CT imaging chief and associate chairman at North Shore-LIJ Radiology, thinks not.

"I think patients are more aware now of the potential risks of radiation exposure, so they ask a lot more questions about the necessity of CT scans, and they also ask about other imaging tests they can have instead of a CT scan," he explained to DOTmed News.

However, he emphasized that for most patients, the risk is still very low. "The only time we start to worry about dose is when patients have multiple scans, and the cumulative dose may pose a potential risk for that patient," he added.

The lifesaving benefits of CT in terms of the diagnostic capability of the equipment to diagnose a disease earlier and help guide the treatment for that disease is a huge medical benefit, according to Gray.

"If people get scared away from CT imaging, the tremendous health benefit they get from an early diagnosis and an ability to get treatment goes away and that would be catastrophic to the world's health," he noted.