The Mount Sinai Hospital is turning to GE Healthcare to help reduce wasteful expenditures and improve healthcare delivery.
The New York-based, 1,171-bed, tertiary care hospital, part of the Mount Sinai Medical Center complex, has signed a multi-year contract with GE Healthcare for management consulting and IT services. Hospital officials will use the company's AgileTrac automated workflow and visualization system to track and improve patient care pathways.
"We feel that linking our clinical and logistics systems together and tying those feeds into the hospital simulation model is a unique approach," said Jack Nelson, the hospital's senior vice president and CIO, in a press release. "The continually refreshed data will give us the most accurate prediction of our current and future operational issues."
The AgileTrac system developed by U.K.-based GE Healthcare, whose U.S. headquarters is in Waukesha, Wis., uses real-time location technology to keep track of people and medical devices. The system also gathers clinical data, which is fed into a system that produces next steps, status updates and notifications and patients and devices move through the facility.
"Patient flow issues as well as capacity and resource constraints are critical issues hospitals have been challenged to deal with for years," said Rob Reilly, general manager of GE Healthcare's commercial service solutions division. "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."
The goal of the project, GE officials say, is to provide hospital executives with a hospital-wide clinical workflow solution that not only provides real-time updates, but anticipates workflow issues. Hospital officials can then use the information to improve operational efficiency, streamline patient flow, reduce wasteful use of hospital resources and decrease a patient's length of stay.
