SIIM: GE previews Centricity Dashboard

MINNEAPOLIS--GE Healthcare offered a sneak peek at its Centricity Dashboard as a work in progress in advance of a release slated for late 2010, during the Society of Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) annual conference this week.

“We explored what the market has now and projected how healthcare reform would impact both the products and the players,” said Don Woodlock, IT senior vice president and global general manager. “Then we spoke with some thought leaders about where they see things heading and they all concluded the same thing: Operational dashboards will shape the future of the field.”

The operational dashboard provides data about inputs, including patient throughput, turnaround time, productivity and scanner usage.

During the conference, GE shared early results of beta testers using dashboard tools. At Trident Medical Center in Charleston, S.C., Director of Imaging Jodi Barteet and staff use a dashboard to monitor imaging procedures and prevent delays in turnaround times. A large-screen monitor shows the status of each pending exam against a target turnaround time, Barteet explained.

“We have it color-coded, so that the patient indicators turn a different color when they get close to that turnaround time,” said Barteet. “If they’ve been waiting 30 minutes, they turn yellow. If they’ve been waiting 45 minutes, they turn red. At any given time, our staff can see at a glance when each procedure was ordered and how long it’s taking for the exam to be done, and act accordingly.”

“You want to be able to take the pulse of your organization,” observed James Whitfill, chief information officer at Scottsdale Medical Imaging in Arizona. “You don’t want to wait for the next quarterly report to come out and realize we have a problem. You want to know about issues in a timely manner, so that you can be more nimble.”

Additionally, GE highlighted Centricity Precision Reporting, its new diagnostic reporting technology for speech understanding across its RIS and PACS portfolios. The reporting software weds workflow with a speech-understanding engine to capture patient data throughout the radiology reporting and image archiving processes.

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