GE Healthcare Showcases New and Enhanced Service Offerings at AAMI 2014
Philadelphia, PA – May 31, 2014 – In an effort to help healthcare providers improve operational efficiency in the midst of a changing regulatory environment, industry consolidation and evolving patient populations, GE Healthcare, a division of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE), today showcased a suite of new and enhanced offerings at the AAMI Annual Conference & Expo in Philadelphia.
The offerings are designed to address some of healthcare providers’ most pressing operational challenges: infrastructure connectivity, getting the right service parts as quickly as possible, avoiding ultrasound downtime related to damaged probes, and synthesizing data to help them optimize their assets.
“With operating margin pressure, clearly it’s not business as usual for health systems and providers,” said Richard Neff, Vice President & General Manager of GE Healthcare Services, US & Canada. “We believe better business performance leads to better healthcare delivery, and we can help. Our new and enhanced offerings are designed to improve operations, and ultimately enable better patient care.”
“These offerings align with GE’s Industrial Internet strategy to use the power of software, data and analytics to address today’s health care challenges, and increase speed and efficiency to benefit both hospitals and patients,” Neff added.
Clinical Engineering Technology Management
GE Healthcare’s new offering, Clinical Engineering Technology Management (CETM), is an end-to-end infrastructure connectivity service that assists IT and Clinical Engineering with design, deployment, maintenance and management of mission critical networks, wireless networks, distributed antenna systems and devices that connect and provide critical patient data to healthcare providers and hospital IT systems. The new service is in direct response to hospitals’ demand for stronger, more evolved support and risk management given the burgeoning use of mobile and other networked devices, as well as complex regulatory requirements.
GE Healthcare’s CETM Service helps hospitals bridge the gap between their IT and Clinical Engineering departments by enabling collaboration between resources and providing ongoing, proactive counsel on risk management of wired and wireless networks that have integrated medical devices or when changes occur either to the network or integrated medical devices. This support continues throughout each phase of the lifecycle of a medical IT network.
Service Shop
Service Shop is GE Healthcare’s new online resource that provides clinical engineering teams with access to GE parts and information for equipment, such as ultrasound, anesthesia, maternal infant care, cardiology and patient monitoring devices. It allows healthcare teams to search, verify and order parts and accessories efficiently via any web-connected device. The easy-to-use interface allows review of previous orders and sharing of carts, saving time and effort and helping to avoid ordering errors. Learn more at ServiceShop.gehealthcare.com.
Ultrasound Probe Management
GE Healthcare now offers services that address one of the biggest pain points for ultrasound users and clinical engineering departments — the ultrasound probe. Its new, customizable ultrasound probe management programs combine the probe experience of UnisynTM, a recently acquired division of GE Healthcare, with the service reliability of GE Healthcare. Through this offering, ultrasound users can effectively and cost efficiently repair, replace and manage their GE and non-GE probes. Next day loaner1 and broad repair capability can help maximize operational efficiency by potentially reducing downtime, as well as increase ultrasound asset utilization and return on investment by extending the useful life of the probe.
iCenter
GE Healthcare has revamped its asset management platform, iCenter, to enable customers to better optimize their biomedical and diagnostic assets through its ability to find information faster and analyze data and create reports more easily.
These improvements mean that customers get instant access to critical information – such as asset status, location, maintenance history, use and planning – with fewer clicks. A built-in analytics engine provides for more visual and intuitive data depiction along with enhanced user security, ultimately enabling improved decision making for care-providing teams and helping to support more efficient hospital operations. An integrated guided tour helps customers quickly acclimate to the new platform with minimal training. The enhanced iCenter is the company’s platform for future online service applications and is designed for scalability to accommodate customer’s future needs.