Barrington, Ill.-- GE Healthcare, a leading provider of perioperative management and anesthesia information management systems, has announced the winners of its annual Customer Innovation Awards (CIA), recognizing Cottage Health System (Santa Barbara, Calif.) and Erlanger Health System (Chattanooga, Tenn.) for transforming patient care through the implementation of GE Centricity® Perioperative solutions. The awards recognize marked improvements in clinical efficiency and financial performance. Now in its third year, the award presentation is part of the Centricity Perioperative Customer Innovation program, providing a platform for users to share best practices and highlight model implementation of GE Centricity Perioperative technology.

"GE's healthymagination campaign is aimed directly at enhancing patient care," said Laurent Rotival, vice president and general manager, GE Healthcare IT. "We're pleased to recognize those that are using the innovative deployment of GE technology to create a model of success that can help transform healthcare at their own institutions."

Cottage Health System (Santa Barbara, CA)

Cottage Health System was named 2009 Innovator of the Year for its inventive process used to capture the data required for regulatory and compliance reporting. Automating the process with Centricity Perioperative solutions saved staff an average of more than 28 hours weekly and allowed the provider to realize more useful information from the data it had been collecting.

"That means Centricity Perioperative has not only enabled us to accurately capture meaningful data but to better use that data in order to facilitate revenue growth for the facility and our providers," said Dr. Jason Campagna, MD, PhD, Cottage Health System's Chief Medical Quality Officer.

With a combined total of nearly 500 beds, more than 20,000 annual admissions, 50,000 annual ER visits and 2,800 births each year, Cottage Health System hospitals excel at patient care and patient satisfaction.

Erlanger Health System (Chattanooga, TN)

In 2009, Erlanger Health System substantially improved the extensive documentation process a facility needs to follow for each specimen collected in the operating room. The automated processes embedded in Centricity Perioperative helped the System improve documentation speed and accuracy, significantly reducing the workload of the OR, pathology and microbiology lab staffs.

Centricity Perioperative provides Erlanger the ability to capture and move patient data throughout the perioperative process, reducing redundancies and providing consistent and more accurate information. Using the interoperability features of Centricity Perioperative, Erlanger Health System automated the specimen requisition process, virtually eliminating resubmissions of illegible and inaccurate forms.

"Cancer staging procedures can typically send at least 15 specimens to the Pathology Department for processing," said Patricia McMeen, RN, Nurse Analyst at Erlanger. "Each case used to take our nurses roughly 15 minutes just to fill out redundant paperwork. Our automated process cuts that time to an average of five minutes, helps increase accuracy and gives the timesavings back to the patients, where it belongs. Our physicans and patients also benefit from quicker turnaround on specimen processing due to increased accuracy and legibility."

Erlanger Health System is a non-profit, academic teaching center affiliated with the University of Tennessee College of Medicine. It is also a Level-One Trauma Center for adults and the only provider of tertiary care services for the citizens of an entire four-state region, encompassing southeast Tennessee, north Georgia, north Alabama and western North Carolina. Erlanger Health System is recognized as one of the nation's finest public hospitals and a leader in healthcare with more than a quarter of a million people treated by Erlanger healthcare professionals each year.

ABOUT CENTRICITY PERIOPERATIVE SOLUTIONS:

Centricity Perioperative puts comprehensive, vital information where it's needed, helping clinicians focus on the patient, not the computer. It integrates anesthesia and ancillary workflows throughout the enterprise and ancillary systems, providing greater patient safety and a more efficient, patient-focused environment. Developed by an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, healthcare specialists, and IT experts, Centricity Perioperative provides a concise, relevant, patient-centric summary, when and wherever needed. Nursing and anesthesia caregivers receive clinically rich content, and organizations can easily make modifications for a tailored fit.

ABOUT GE HEALTHCARE:

GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our broad expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, drug discovery, biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies, performance improvement and performance solutions services help our customers to deliver better care to more people around the world at a lower cost. In addition, we partner with healthcare leaders, striving to leverage the global policy change necessary to implement a successful shift to sustainable healthcare systems.

Our "healthymagination" vision for the future invites the world to join us on our journey as we continuously develop innovations focused on reducing costs, increasing access and improving quality and efficiency around the world. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $17 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 46,000 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.