These 6 Apps Will Help Doctors And Hospitals Work Better

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The combination of massive computing power, digitized information and connectivity has taken the world into a future few people imagined even just a decade ago. Still, talk to experts and they’ll tell you the commercial Internet, embodied by the smartphone, Facebook, Amazon and Uber, is just the start. The next chapter will belong to the Industrial Internet which connects machines generating rivers of data fueling powerful analytics. The results will give their operators new insights and help them optimize everything from transportation to medicine.

This is already happening. GE, for example, is already connecting jet engines, wind turbines and medical scanners to its cloud-based industrial-grade Predix platform. Jeff Immelt, GE chairman and CEO, expects Predix will have 200,000 such assets under management by the end of the year.

One system using Predix is the GE Health Cloud. Clinicians will be able to access it from their smartphones or tablets. The system will allow developers to write apps that can help doctors arrive at diagnoses faster, alert them to hidden conditions and even handle billing. Additionally, the GE Health Cloud will assist hospitals, health systems and private physician practices with gaining insights into their workflows and operations.

Last November GE Healthcare announced the first four apps, which focused on advanced imaging and clinical collaboration. It just added six more. The new apps will expand to areas of healthcare including life sciences, financial billing and claims management. They will even let doctors create digital twins of patients in the intensive care unit. Here’s the list:

Centricity Insights forIntensive Care

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The Centricity Insights for Intensive Care app will use a patient’s data — such things as age, weight, smoking habits, diabetes and time on a ventilator— to create a digital twin of the patient to help doctors predict the average length of stay for that patient in the intensive care unit (ICU) and the probability that the patient will have further specific complications. Patients in the ICU may encounter renal failure, pneumonia or sepsis, for example.

Radiology Insights for X-ray reject/repeat rates

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GE has deep domain expertise in X-Ray technology and the app is the latest step. Dr. William Coolidge (above) invented what is considered the modern X-ray tube. He also developed an early portable X-ray machine. Coolidge’s X-ray machine was used in military hospitals during World War I.

The Radiology Insights app is intended to help reduce repeat/reject X-ray rates by using machine data to track and trend such rates. It helps identify follow-up training needs for radiographers.

 Radiology Insights for Modality Utilization

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This image of blood vessels inside the skull was captured with GE’s Revolution CT scanner. Image credit: GE Healthcare

This mouthful of a name is a label for a fairly common problem, which involves getting patients quickly scheduled for the scans they need. This Radiology Insights app will use machine data to track modality utilization across a region or hospital system to help care-delivery networks make the most of their modality assets.

CortexID Suite

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John Schenck and his team at GE Global Research built the machine that took the first MRI image of the brain. Image credit: GE Global Research

There are no definitive tests to distinguish among the many different types of dementia. This suite of apps may help reveal patterns, suggesting which dementia a patient might suffer from.

The CortexID Suite may provide insights to physicians in the image-interpretation process of amyloid PET studies, which are typically used for patients being evaluated for cognitive impairment or cognitive decline. It’s an adjunct to other diagnostic evaluations.

Centricity Insights for Financial Management

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Mountains of denied medical insurance claims are a real headache for both doctors and patients. It’s a problem GE tackled last year when it launched DenialsIQ, which uses analytics to uncover hidden patterns in claims denials so that administrators can proactively fix them. This helped one customer reduce denied charges by 47 percent, saving $93,000 in rework costs in one month, according to a case study from UC-Irvine.

Centricity Insights for Materials ManagementOptimization

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The Centricity Insights for Materials Management Optimization app will help analyze healthcare-provider inventory, suppliers and the cost of materials used in cardiology, perioperative and interventional radiology procedures. Materials account for a significant portion of the cost of surgery.