GE Healthcare has announced it will invest $2 billion in software over the next five years. Working with the GE Software Center of Excellence in San Ramon, California, the GE subsidiary will use the funds to improve its hospital operations management software and reducing waste and inefficiency in the hospital software status quo.
GE Healthcare Software Chief Technology Officer Evren Eryurek stated in comments posted on GE's website that GE Healthcare is developing a single common software platform that will span all GE Healthcare products and services (which include software for medical imaging, IT services, patient monitoring, diagnosis, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing).
"Often, our healthcare customers are faced with disparate IT platforms, with a variety of servers and databases. In addition, their clinicians many times deal with broken workflows for healthcare data analysis, lack of interoperability between healthcare IT systems, and a less-than-desirable user experience as they work tirelessly to deliver care," Eryurek stated. "Investments GE Healthcare is making will address those challenges and enable our customers to improve their operations, asset management, and workflow effectiveness as well as to deliver consistent care especially to large patient populations."
Eryurek said healthcare inefficiency has a global cost of $731 billion per year, and just a 1 percent improvement in efficiency could lead to savings of $63 billion over 15 years.
GE Healthcare outlined several ways its new investment would help address inefficiencies in healthcare. Better software could speed up scheduling and data entry. Clinical decision support software could improve outcomes as well as save doctors time. Software can reduce costs by analyzing workflows and identifying areas where providers could get more out of staff utilization, payment cycles, or reimbursement rates. Finally, by promoting care coordination and collaboration, software could keep multiple care givers from having to do the same work.
Eryurek also stressed two big ideas that GE Healthcare will be focused on: the "industrial internet" and big data.
"The industrial internet represents an open, global ecosystem of highly intelligent machines that connect, communicate and cooperate with each other and people, leading to breakthrough levels of efficiency and productivity," he said. "Just like the internet transformed communication years ago, the industrial internet is turning the lines of communication between the caregiver and the patient from a winding dirt road into an express highway."
Big data refers to smartly using the massive amount of health data that's produced and stored by GE Healthcare's software, something that should be easier to do on a common platform.
"Think about all the X-rays, CT scans, MRIs and lab reports done every day, think about digital pathology and images of those samples, and now think about even genomics data that is becoming more mainstream for predictive analysis," Eryurek said. "The insights that are yet to be unlocked within this data hold the answers to many unknowns that medicine has been dealing with for decades."
