GE Healthcare Brings Mobile Computing To Point-Of-Care For Enhanced Vital Sign Collection At UCSF

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Article Date: 29 Feb 2008 - 4:00 PDT

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GE Healthcare IT announced a collaboration with Intel Corporation and Motion Computing(R) to join forces on a mobile computing solution designed to eliminate the manual collection of patient vital sign data. Slated for deployment at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center, the goal is to provide nurses with a mobile, clinician-centric workflow that incorporates the Motion C5 mobile clinical assistant from Intel into vital sign collection using Centricity Enterprise in-patient electronic medical record (EMR) software and GE Healthcare's DINAMAP® patient monitoring devices.

"GE Healthcare's collaboration with UCSF, Intel and Motion Computing clearly demonstrates the breadth and depth of solutions that we offer to help customers increase productivity and enhance patient care," said Laurent Rotival, Senior Vice President and General Manager, GE Healthcare IT. "As an innovator constantly looking at new available technologies that can improve care, GE Healthcare continues to increase value to its customers by enabling the integration of these novel devices into Centricity Enterprise."

The solution replaces the use of Computer on Wheels (COWs) to access Centricity Enterprise electronic medical records (EMR) and is made possible by the creation of a new cable system and Java applet that allows vital sign collection on GE DINAMAP monitors to flow directly into Centricity Enterprise. GE engineers also designed a new user interface optimized for navigation and data input using the Motion C5 pen and stylus capabilities.

Using Mobile Computing's formal clinician usability study methodology, UCSF piloted the mobile, clinician-centric workflow to fully utilize the potential of Centricity Enterprise EMR to help improve patient care. Initial benefits of the pilot have included enhanced patient interaction, reduced documentation delay and greater portability by the use of required clinical logins.

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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