WAUWATOSA, WI -- Peace of mind now comes standard with every member of GE Healthcare's Innova family of interventional x-ray products. Recognizing the critical nature of the interventional environment, GE Healthcare is now utilizing remote monitoring and data mining techniques to continuously enhance system reliability, ease of use and uptime.

A key driver is Innova Promise, standard with each x-ray system under warranty or service agreement. Innova Promise is a commitment unlike any other in the industry today providing proactive issue resolution and decreasing unplanned downtime. With 1200 systems monitored, GEHC Engineering and Service teams receive performance characteristics over 125 parameters, several times per day. This results in the collection of up to 375,000 data points daily; 2,625,000 weekly.

"Think of it as a large population clinical study," said Amy Lazarus, General Manager of GE Healthcare's Interventional Service. "Just as a larger patient sample size gives clinical data more credibility, we benefit from our large and expanding sample size. Because of the number of parameters measured over this large population, we are able to identify patterns and root causes much more quickly and accurately."
Ultimately, this comprehensive monitoring compresses from months to days the time to gather device performance data used in developing installed base upgrades and new product designs.

Today, more than half of the occasional exam interrupts are now linked with a proactive solution, improving response and repair time. GE Healthcare's field engineers are able to arrive on-site with an awareness of the issue and often with the parts to make the repair. In fact, in 2007, nearly one in four cases managed by our Cardiovascular Technical Support Team were initiated proactively, ahead of the customer call.

With Innova Promise, an InSite Broadband connection regularly monitors the system. An alert is generated automatically if temperature and humidity readings reach an abnormally high or low level, fluid levels are nearing low levels, or when an excessive deviation is present in any of more than one hundred other possible parameters. When an error is triggered or deemed imminent, the system informs GE's cardiovascular service team with a recommended fix.

In essence, the system is telling us when it has a symptom. As one field engineer recently stated, the system calls me when it needs attention, often before the customer has noticed anything wrong. Innova Promise is one of the driving forces behind several industry awards bestowed upon GE Healthcare's Cardiovascular Services Team. Most recently, leading independent third-party research firm IMV Servicetrak ranked GE first among vendors in Overall OEM Service Performance for X-Ray Cardiology & Angiography service.

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