WAUKESHA, WI - GE Healthcare has signed a multi-year agreement with The Mount Sinai Hospital to address a significant challenge facing healthcare institutions today - delivering high quality services in an environment of scarce resources. As operating and financial executives in hospitals across the country are hunting for ways to accelerate efficiency while improving patient care, Mount Sinai has recognized an opportunity to address this issue through a solution that combines change management consulting and sophisticated technology.

In the early phase of the agreement, GE Healthcare experts in Lean Six Sigma process management will work with Mt Sinai staff and GE Healthcare's AgileTracTM automated workflow and visualization system to track and optimize the most important patient care pathways. This phase will enable hospital staff and administration to observe their clinical pathways and allow the hospital to visualize problems and develop real time solutions.

Together, Mount Sinai and GE will gather real-time data on clinical workflow patterns throughout the 1,171-bed, 2.7 million square foot tertiary-care hospital to highlight process bottlenecks and showcase areas of improvement. The goal is to streamline patient flow, improve operational efficiency, and decrease patients length of stay by decreasing wait times and freeing up capacity that has been, until this project, untapped.

"Patient flow issues as well as capacity and resource constraints are critical issues hospital have been challenged to deal with for years. Our team of experts is eager to work with the Mount Sinai staff on this exciting effort, as we believe that leveraging technology as an enabler and a means to sustain change is the way to find an answer to these long-standing issues," says Rob Reilly, GM Commercial Service Solutions.

As the project develops, GE will collaborate with Mount Sinai to characterize and simulate hospital-wide clinical workflow using GE's proprietary simulation tools and Mount Sinai's own real time data. The simulation model will help to identify operational issues hours or even days before they occur, enabling the hospital to mitigate bottlenecks and resource constraints before they impact patients.

"We feel that linking our clinical and logistics systems together and tying those feeds into the hospital simulation model is a unique approach. The continually refreshed data will give us the most accurate prediction of our current and future operational issues," says Jack Nelson, Senior VP and CIO of Mount Sinai Hospital.

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