HIMSS: GE IT CEO touts debut of next-gen clinical knowledge platform, eHealth Platform
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| Video: Vishal Wanchoo, President and CEO of GE Healthcare IT |
The clinical knowledge base—dubbed Qualibria for quality and library—was launched this week, but won’t be available until the second half of 2010. The open architecture-based system, developed along with Intermountain Healthcare and Mayo Clinic, combines real-time patient data from existing IT systems (regardless of vendor) and evidence-based best practices in a dashboard for more intuitive visualization by caregivers.
“As with many healthcare institutions, clinical excellence is a top priority at Intermountain,” said Marc Probst, chief information officer of Intermountain Healthcare in Salt Lake City. “We partnered with GE to build Qualibria because we needed an innovative platform that would continue Intermountain’s history of clinical quality improvement while allowing us to share clinical best practices with other organizations who have a passion for improving their performance. We’re very proud of the contributions we’ve made to Qualibria and we believe that it will allow our institution and countless others to achieve new levels of quality.” He noted that GE and Intermountain have contractual arrangements with regard to the joint development, but that the health system’s objective to create an innovative system to replace their 30-year-old system, rather than royalties long term.
GE also announced that Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., has agreed to an expanded collaboration on Qualibria. For the last two years, Mayo Clinic has contributed informatics and clinical expertise to build Qualibria’s medical terminology management tools. Mayo Clinic will provide expertise in developing this platform for the delivery of best practice clinical content, including knowledge, protocols, and care guidelines that will be made available to other Qualibria customers.
Qualibria supports performance improvement initiatives by alerting clinical staff to variations from desired practice leading to reduction of inappropriate variation in care delivery. By presenting dashboards for specific sets of patients, based on condition, role or other criteria, the system enables immediate access to relevant patient data, resulting in better clinical and financial outcomes.
The system is intended for international use. Vishal Wanchoo, president and CEO of GE Healthcare IT, confirmed GE is speaking with healthcare providers in Hong Kong, Germany, Australia and France about implementing Qualibria.
GE’s new eHealth platform is an infrastructure offering that includes expanded services for health information exchange (HIE), a clinical portal and a patient health management system. The standards-based platform, which builds on the company’s first generation of products launched last year, is designed for international as well as domestic customers and can be adapted for regional markets in either hosted or deployed models.
"Healthcare professionals around the world recognize that connecting the healthcare IT ecosystem has enormous potential to improve the quality of health outcomes and to reduce costs," said Wanchoo. "Our new eHealth Solutions platform builds upon our years of experience in clinical information exchange, can help our domestic customers leverage their existing software while helping them meet several meaningful use criteria, and provide our global customers with a foundation and toolset for building national-level EHR infrastructure."
“To help our customers achieve meaningful use, [it also includes] patient engagement technology—both for wellness and chronic disease management,” Wanchoo added. “Customers have been asking for a commitment on interoperability among multiple vendors. And this [eHealth] platform allows for that.”
At the core of the new eHealth Solutions platform is the eHealth Information Exchange (HIE) -- a standards-based HIE infrastructure that integrates clinical data from across disparate systems and manages the wide variety of clinical records, document types and terminologies pervasive in today's healthcare system. Building upon the highly flexible infrastructure from GE's strategic partner InterComponentWare (ICW), the eHealth Solutions platform contains features that help assist providers in managing patient consents and privacy controls, provider notifications and security.
Sitting on top of the platform are applications such as the eHealth Clinical Portal and eHealth Patient Health Manager. The eHealth Clinical Portal provides clear visibility into aggregated data from the HIE for the care provider. The eHealth Patient Health Manager (PHM) is a web-based tool for patient engagement. With a PHM, patients can access their clinical data, record data points such as weight, glucose levels and blood pressure readings, and then share this information with their medical team or family members through controlled data access.
More value-added applications are planned to take advantage of the flexible and efficient coding tools embedded in the eHealth Solution platform, according to Wanchoo.
Mary C. Tierney, MS, Vice President & Chief Content Officer, TriMed Media Group
Mary joined TriMed Media in 2003. She was the founding editor and editorial director of Health Imaging, Cardiovascular Business, Molecular Imaging Insight and CMIO, now known as Clinical Innovation + Technology. Prior to TriMed, Mary was the editorial director of HealthTech Publishing Company, where she had worked since 1991. While there, she oversaw four magazines and related online media, and piloted the launch of two magazines and websites. Mary holds a master’s in journalism from Syracuse University. She lives in East Greenwich, R.I., and when not working, she is usually running around after her family, taking photos or cooking.