03 March 2010
GE Healthcare To Enable Quality Reporting Across Health Information Exchanges
ATLANTA, GA — MARCH 3, 2010 – As a result of recent enhancements, customers of GE’s eHealth Information Exchange (HIE) will be able to view reports on healthcare quality at the provider level, state level and information exchange level based entirely on information collected from participating HIEs and providers later this year*. This planned capability will allow organizations to gain greater insight into the quality of care they provide and serve as a foundation for quality improvement.
GE Healthcare has been at the forefront of measuring quality with aggregated and de-identified clinical data and has been providing quality reporting services to its EMR customers for over 5 years through its Clinical Data Services (CDS) business. CDS has also enabled its customers to participate in incentive programs related to quality reporting and improvement, such as the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Physician Quality Reporting Initiative, Bridges To Excellence, and the National Committee for Quality Assurance Diabetes Recognition program.
CDS currently uses de-identified clinical data from its rapidly growing database of over 15 million patients to allow its customers, including physicians, to gain valuable insight into health outcomes. By utilizing the newly created database of de-identified information from participating HIEs, CDS will enrich its ability to aggregate, analyze, and interpret healthcare data and information to support its customers’ efforts to improve the quality of patient care and enhance healthcare system efficiency.
“Metrics surrounding quality of care improvements are at the center of recent Federal healthcare initiatives, including proposed meaningful use guidelines,” said Brandon Savage, Chief Medical Officer for GE Healthcare IT. “With clinical information coming in from multiple sources, GE is well positioned to facilitate comparative effectiveness and outcomes research, enabling customers to address these key priorities.”
GE’s eHealth Information Exchange is 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. Upon this standards-based HIE foundation, GE plans to offer quality reporting (on de-identified data) as the part of a series of value-add solutions that aid the transformation of care delivery by measuring quality retrospectively.
“Standards-based HIEs like ours are changing the nature of healthcare information aggregation and transparency,” said Savage. “This will allow healthcare providers, states and national public health organizations to measure, understand and improve outcomes with a richness never before possible.”
The solution is being shown at this week’s meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society in Atlanta.
About GE Healthcare
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our broad expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, drug discovery, biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies, performance improvement and performance solutions services help our customers to deliver better care to more people around the world at a lower cost. In addition, we partner with healthcare leaders, striving to leverage the global policy change necessary to implement a successful shift to sustainable healthcare systems.
Our "healthymagination" vision for the future invites the world to join us on our journey as we continuously develop innovations focused on reducing costs, increasing access and improving quality and efficiency around the world. 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 www.gehealthcare.com.
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