 "GE Launches Next-Generation eHealth Platform")
GE Healthcare has launched its next-generation eHealth Solutions platform – an infrastructure offering that includes expanded services for health information exchange, a clinical portal and a patient health management system. Showcased this week during the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2010 Annual Conference & Exhibition in Atlanta, USA, the new platform can be adapted for regional markets in either hosted or deployed models.
“Healthcare professionals around the world recognise that connecting the healthcare IT ecosystem has enormous potential to improve the quality of health outcomes and to reduce costs,” said Vishal Wanchoo, President and CEO of GE Healthcare IT. “Our new eHealth Solutions platform builds upon our experience in clinical information exchange and can provide our global customers with a foundation and toolset for building national-level EHR infrastructure.”
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 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.
“Better and more complete patient information at the point-of-care helps doctors and nurses make better care decisions with fewer medical errors,” said Wanchoo. “Our platform securely delivers complete longitudinal, cross-community patient records for care providers, and integrates directly into clinical workflows.”
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 coding tools embedded in the eHealth Solution platform. The eHealth platform is being marketed worldwide to care providers, IDNs, HIEs and governments and will support standards-based connectivity with GE’s Centricity family of products, as well as non-GE products.