- Providing hospitals with important data to identify areas of improvement in the cath lab
Washington, D.C. — September 14, 2014 — GE Healthcare has installed Cath Lab Efficiency Manager at Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, MO , a new analytical tool that analyzes the performance of an interventional lab providing hospitals with important data they can use to identify areas of improvement. Cath Lab Efficiency Manager provides a near-real-time dashboard which displays measures of inefficiency and identifies the factors impacting performance. The tool visualizes where changes can be made to help increase productivity and help improve patient care.
“The interventional lab can be the most valuable and the most costly area of the hospital. While many of the determining factors of cath lab efficiency are known, identifying the factors contributing to interventional lab performance can be challenging,” said Dave Strelow, Director of Cardiovascular Services at Saint Luke’s Mid-America Heart Hospital, the first hospital to install the Cath Lab Efficiency Manager application. “This new tool gives us the information we need to establish baselines and determine performance outliers. By identifying this information, we can easily make the appropriate adjustments in our lab to reduce inefficiencies and improve overall performance to help lower healthcare costs.”
Data collection using the Mac-Lab* and CardioLab* recording systems provides an easy way to consistently record stamped procedure logs, staffing and medication information, complication and risk factor details, access type, radiation dose area and fluoro time data in the system. Customers with GE CVIS systems can use this new application to leverage the data they have already collected by establishing baselines for process improvement initiatives.
To produce this data, Cath Lab Efficiency Manager uses powerful analytics developed at GE’s Software Center of Excellence (COE) in San Ramon, California. GE’s Software COE consists of a team of development engineers, data scientists and user experience designers who design and develop applications for analyzing the performance of urban power grids, aircraft engines and national transportation systems among other applications. “We’re pleased to have this level of expertise being applied to software for use in the interventional lab. This tool provides visibility to the factors that drive variability and variance from peak performance,” said Don Woodlock, Cardiovascular IT, General Manager, GE Healthcare. “These sophisticated algorithms can offer cardiologists the freedom they need to concentrate on patients and operate a well-organized cath lab instead of spending time hunting through data to find problems.”
The collaboration with St. Luke’s is a critical step in the development of this offering. Based on feedback from Saint Luke’s, GE continues to build upon the Cath Lab Efficiency Manager using Agile Software Development techniques to ensure the tool provides useful, intuitive, easy to use, and powerful functionality and to make this solution available to the broader hospital community. “Using this tool is like being in a central command station visualizing the operation of the Cath Labs in all your hospitals. The tool allows you to visualize your operations, set goals, automatically identify where those goals aren’t being met, automatically identify outlier scenarios that aren’t operating as efficiently as the rest of your organization, and ultimately improve,” said Woodlock.
The Cath Lab Efficiency Manager software is being shown at this year’s Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) meeting in Washington, DC, September 14-16, 2014.
About GE Healthcare
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services to meet the demand for increased access, enhanced quality and more affordable healthcare around the world. GE (NYSE: GE) works on things that matter – great people and technologies taking on tough challenges. From medical imaging, software & IT, patient monitoring and diagnostics to drug discovery, biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies and performance improvement solutions, GE Healthcare helps medical professionals deliver great healthcare to their patients.
Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute, a member of Saint Luke’s Health System and a teaching affiliate of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, is one of the preeminent cardiovascular programs in the country. Its legacy of innovation began more than 25 years ago when it opened as the nation’s first heart hospital. Since then, the Heart Institute has earned a world-wide reputation for excellence in the treatment of heart disease, including interventional cardiology, cardiovascular surgery, imaging, heart failure, transplant, heart disease prevention, women’s heart disease, electrophysiology, outcomes research, and health economics. With more than 50 full-time board certified cardiovascular specialists on staff, the Heart Institute offers one of the largest heart failure/heart transplant programs in the country, has the largest experience with transcatheter aortic valve replacement in the Midwest, and is a global teaching site for the newest approaches to opening challenging blocked arteries using minimally invasive techniques.
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