GE Healthcare IT Unveils Centricity Enterprise Monitored Care Application For Clinical Device Integration

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Article Date: 09 Sep 2008 - 4:00 PDT

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In an effort to provide clinicians with comprehensive patient data at the point of care, GE Healthcare IT introduced Centricity© Enterprise Monitored Care, an application that integrates clinical and medical device data under one standard platform. Developed in partnership with the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), the application augments a comprehensive electronic record using data captured directly from bedside devices in monitored environments such as intensive care, cardiac care units (ICU, CCU), and the emergency department.

"Critical Care and highly monitored areas are often paper intensive, and in some critical care areas, nurses spend up to 40% of their time on manual documentation," said Dr. Michael Blum, Associate Professor of Medicine and Chief Medical Information Officer, UCSF. "Being a long-term GE Healthcare customer, we are excited about the ability to automatically capture information from the monitors and integrate them into the patient's comprehensive electronic record in Centricity Enterprise. We believe that this will prove to be a time saver and satisfier for our clinicians."

"In a monitoring-intensive area, clinicians can require complex, up-to-the-minute patient information that is critical for effective treatment decisions," said Laurent Rotival, Vice President and General Manager, GE Healthcare IT. "Digitalizing these areas will not only improve the quality of care, but will also reduce inefficiency so clinicians can focus on direct patient care. GE Healthcare and UCSF have had a long-standing relationship. We are very pleased that UCSF elected to become a co-development partner for Monitored Care due to their depth of clinical informatics capabilities".

The Centricity Enterprise Monitored Care application helps improve the quality of care by integrating all monitored care information into a single electronic record, providing better display of clinical data for faster and easier interpretation and point-of-care decision making. The application's Centricity Device Interface (CDI) connects with medical device gateways to integrate real-time clinical data (i.e. heart rate, blood pressure) within Centricity Enterprise. This integration helps reduce time spent by clinicians on manual documentation and allows more time for direct patient care. Additionally, the Enterprise Flowsheet will allow data captured from devices such as monitors and ventilators to be displayed alongside data about intravenous medications and fluids, intake & output, laboratory results, and other categories of data for more efficient documentation and interpretation.

Centricity Enterprise Monitored Care adds to GE Healthcare's Centricity Enterprise solution by bringing in the critical care component to help facilitate communications, ease workflow, speed documentation, reduce the potential for medical error, and improve efficiency across the healthcare enterprise. Centricity Enterprise unites financial, administrative, and clinical data to enable healthcare organizations to create and maintain lifetime patient records.

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.

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