GE Healthcare Partners, the company's global management consulting sector, has entered a five-year partnership with ThoughtWire to help health systems and hospitals implement new digital tools.

“Partnerships like this are increasingly common and probably essential for the next era of health care transformation,” Jeff Terry, managing principal at GE Healthcare Partners, told HCB News.

The companies’ goals are to help improve access to complex care, cut turnaround times for lab and radiology results, and reduce wait times in the emergency department and the length of stay in the hospital. They plan on doing that by prioritizing activity anticipating bottlenecks, bringing awareness to delays in care and monitoring risk in real time.



GE Healthcare Partners helps clients redesign smart facilities, redesign care delivery systems and managed patient pathways in real time. ThoughtWire automates workflows to speed up the support processes.

“These capabilities are mutually reinforcing. GE tools can make ThoughtWire's tools smarter, and vice versa ... all for the benefit of providers and the patients they serve,” said Terry.

At the core of the partnership are GE’s real-time decision support apps and ThoughtWire’s workflow apps. The decision support apps for command centers take data from multiple source systems and impact wait times by prioritizing activity and highlighting delays.

One of GE’s command center apps sequences operating room or emergency department room clean requests. It reprioritizes a room that might not be needed for eight hours and then ThoughtWire’s workflow app supports the request and assignment.

What makes it unique is its focus on enterprise-level seamless patient care, according to Terry, who describes it as GPS for a hospital or health system that serves the physicians and their patients.

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