Enhancements To GE's Cardiovascular Service Deliver Greater Physician Satisfaction, Peace Of Mind

Main Category: Cardiovascular / Cardiology
Article Date: 24 Oct 2007 - 2:00 PST

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Asked what inspired her cardiovascular services team to enact two very different programs aimed at the same basic goals of reliability, confidence and satisfaction, General Manager Amy Lazarus replies simply, "Our customers did!"

GE's new dedicated cardiology call center offers hospitals a single, U.S. based point of contact with faster service from staff specifically trained in cardiovascular products. Additionally, Innova Promise continues to be enhanced and deliver peace-of-mind by identifying potential issues in the Cath lab remotely, often before they're even noticed by the hospital personnel.

The cardiology call center has been handling support calls for GE's Cardiac x-ray (Advantx®/Innova®), Invasive Monitoring (Mac-Lab® IT, CardioLab® IT , ComboLab IT), Centricity CVIS & cardiovascular PACS since October 2006, during operating hours. The team currently responds to calls Monday through Friday, 5:00am to 9:00pm Central Time, but GE plans to expand those hours as it expands the team. Each new operator will be trained with the same vigilance the existing team, including vigorous feedback, personal interviews with engineers on the GE service and technical support team to reduce wait times. According to Call Center Team Lead Djily Drame, the average wait time to reach a trained operator is 4-6 seconds. "Being quick to answer calls is one key to our success," Drame explained, "but product knowledge and accuracy are equally important. Before we started the dedicated service, our customers would sometimes bounce around from operator to operator, just trying to reach someone who knew about the equipment they had. Now, that person is the one that picks up the call, every time. Our customers asked us to change and we did."

Innova Promise is GE's commitment to remotely monitor the system through an InSite Broadband connection to detect exam interruptions and potential failures. Most importantly, it comes standard with every Innovaâ X-ray system under warranty or service contract. To date, GE has more than 2,000 systems being actively monitored.

"If everything is working right, ours is still a high-risk service," said Syd Rubencamp, Cardiology Director of St. Rose Dominican Hospitals in Las Vegas. "When a patient comes in with a full-blown heart attack, equipment failure is simply unacceptable."

With Innova Promise, GE can detect primary items such as low fluid levels and temperature and humidity spikes. They can also detect more complex issues around the mechanical and electrical functionality of the system, and have even included an integrated UPS with the system to provide protection from power surges. GE's entire cardiovascular service team is equipped to receive automated alerts when there is an indication of a problem.

For example, Cary Lucian, field service engineer for GE Healthcare, recently received a message on his cell phone regarding a potential issue detected at Scripps Memorial Hospital La Jolla, the busiest cardiovascular center in San Diego County. From the diagnostics, Lucian was able to identify the cause and immediately order the replacement tube to prepare for the maintenance call. "Cary took the initiative, knew what he had to do and had the replacement parts on site before we even knew there was a problem," Lisa Gonsalves, Database Administrator for Scripps Memorial remarked. "This proactive service decreases emergent downtime, which is critical to our clinicians."

Lazarus noted this level of reliability creates a "good problem" for the service team. "As we often fix the trouble behind the scenes, our biggest challenge is letting the healthcare providers or clinicians or hospitalsknow the value we added!" she remarked. "As long as they see the equipment as more reliable, that's our real reward."

The Innova Promise comes standard on all GE Innova family products.

"These programs are, as all of our programs are, the direct result of customer feedback," stated Lazarus. "We understand that healthcare providers need to focus on patient care, so our focus is providing exceptional reliability - both through on-site and remote support. As feedback continues to come in, we'll continue to evolve."

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. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at http://www.gehealthcare.com.

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