Mt. Sinai Hospital
Mount Sinai Hospital and GE Healthcare Collaborate on Patient Flow, Asset Management
February 11, 2009
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.
The AgileTracTM system uses Real Time Location Technology (RTLS) to track the locations of people and devices critical to advancing patient flow through the hospital. The system integrates key events and data from other clinical IT systems in the hospital in addition to its collection of real time data that is automatically fed into the system to manage patient workflow. The patient workflow is managed through an engine that integrates the data with proprietary algorithms to provide next steps, status updates, and notifications as patients and resources move through the facility. Critical operational status updates are visible in real time on various dashboard views throughout the hospital.
About GE Healthcare
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, performance improvement, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform, treat and monitor disease, so patients can live their lives to the fullest.
GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention. 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.
About The Mount Sinai Medical Center
The Mount Sinai Medical Center encompasses The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai School of Medicine. The Mount Sinai Hospital is one of the nation's oldest, largest and most-respected voluntary hospitals. Founded in 1852, Mount Sinai is a 1,171-bed tertiary-care teaching facility internationally acclaimed for excellence in clinical care. Last year, nearly 50,000 people were treated at Mount Sinai as inpatients, and there were nearly 450,000 outpatient visits to the Medical Center. Mount Sinai School of Medicine is internationally recognized as a leader in groundbreaking clinical and basic-science research It has a faculty of more than 3,400 in 38 clinical and basic science departments and centers. For more information, visit www.mountsinai.org.
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.
The AgileTracTM system uses Real Time Location Technology (RTLS) to track the locations of people and devices critical to advancing patient flow through the hospital. The system integrates key events and data from other clinical IT systems in the hospital in addition to its collection of real time data that is automatically fed into the system to manage patient workflow. The patient workflow is managed through an engine that integrates the data with proprietary algorithms to provide next steps, status updates, and notifications as patients and resources move through the facility. Critical operational status updates are visible in real time on various dashboard views throughout the hospital.
About GE Healthcare
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, performance improvement, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform, treat and monitor disease, so patients can live their lives to the fullest.
GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention. 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.
About The Mount Sinai Medical Center
The Mount Sinai Medical Center encompasses The Mount Sinai Hospital and Mount Sinai School of Medicine. The Mount Sinai Hospital is one of the nation's oldest, largest and most-respected voluntary hospitals. Founded in 1852, Mount Sinai is a 1,171-bed tertiary-care teaching facility internationally acclaimed for excellence in clinical care. Last year, nearly 50,000 people were treated at Mount Sinai as inpatients, and there were nearly 450,000 outpatient visits to the Medical Center. Mount Sinai School of Medicine is internationally recognized as a leader in groundbreaking clinical and basic-science research It has a faculty of more than 3,400 in 38 clinical and basic science departments and centers. For more information, visit www.mountsinai.org.