C O M P A N Y I N S I G H T
In Partnership With:
Making healthcare digital Written by Nell Walker Produced by David Kulowitch
G E H E A LT H C A R E
As a business composed of digital natives, GE Healthcare is well placed to make great technological strides. We speak to Charles Koontz, Jon Zimmerman, and James Richards about how GE Healthcare has transformed both itself and its industry
“We
are digital natives. We are purely about people, process, information, and IT. We speak, eat, and breathe digital.” Jon Zimmerman, Vice President and General Manager at GE, is animated and eloquent as he describes his responsibilities over GE Healthcare’s valuebased solutions portfolio. GE Healthcare exists to leverage its best-in-class technology and digital expertise to deliver outcomes for its customers, with a core focus on value-based care: enhanced care quality, increased practice efficiency, lower per capita costs and provider
4
satisfaction. Zimmerman is hugely excited by GE Healthcare’s ability to ensure that “the right people are in the right roles, with the right skills, in the right quantities, at the right time.” But it takes a detailed and sophisticated strategic vision to achieve the standards GE Healthcare has set itself – a vision that has led the organization to consolidate resources into a tight, streamlined, horizontal platform, as described by Charles Koontz, CEO of GE Healthcare Digital and CDO of GE Healthcare. “We’ve created horizontal capabilities, which we’re driving at several levels,” he explains with a passion borne of experience. “There’s the Internet of Things, which we take advantage of using our Predix analytics platform – it connects devices, collects the data,
TECHNOLOGY
Central to GE Healthcare’s digital strategy is the use of cloud technology – to collect, analyze and process data and to serve as a common founda
WE SPEAK, EAT, AND BREATHE DIGITAL – Jon Zimmerman, Vice President and General Manager at GE
Jon Zimmerman Vice President and General Manager, ValueBased Care Solutions
Zimmerman is the VP and GM of Value-Based Care Solutions at GE Healthcare. He was previously at Availity, where he served as the General Manager of Clinical Solutions, leading the strategic development, planning and delivery of clinical information exchange via the Availity Health Information Network.
Visualutions Inc. is the leader in software enhancements to support county, state, and federal reporting requirements on the GE Healthcare Centricity™ Practice Solution. In addition to integrated dental, business intelligence, referral tracking, and behavioral health software we also offer full-service revenue cycle management, cloud-hosting and managed IT services.
281.297.2257 info@visualutions.com /visualutions /visualutions
™
www.Visualutions.com Referral Tracking
www.Visualutions.com/Referral-Tracking Full Integration With Centricity™ Auto-Assign Task By Admin Role Customizable Steps For Each Task List Extensive Search And Sort Features User-Friendly Design
www.Visualutions.com/RCM Full Cycle Management Rehabilitation Forensic Therapy
VisAnalytics Dashboards www.Visualutions.com/VisAnalytics
Cloud-Based Built To Meet NCQA Standards Single Sign-On From Centricity™ Built On Curated Datasets User-Based Conngurations
G E H E A LT H C A R E
Charles Koontz President and CEO of GE Healthcare Digital and CDO of GE Healthcare
Koontz is Chief Digital Officer (CDO), GE Healthcare, and President and CEO, GE Healthcare Digital. In his roles, Koontz leads the horizontal implementation of analytics, cloud technology and deep learning solutions across all of GE Healthcare, and the strategy and operations of the Healthcare Digital business, which includes software solutions for enterprise imaging, workforce management and financial management.
8
and ingests it into the cloud. We do a lot of what we call Advanced Preventive Maintenance, which is driven across the company and applied to healthcare. Plus, we are driving two dimensions of horizontal: the internal IT system that we call Digital Thread, and a consortium of third-party developers.” The Digital Thread is, quite literally, what connects all operational processes within GE Healthcare. The thread automates processes and enables insights and actions that improve performance. This lies within the remit of James Richards, the company’s CIO, who summarizes its purpose. “The simplest phrase I consistently use to explain ‘digital’ is that we need to get more output with less input,” he says. “Most companies that have been successful in digital have not entirely built their own technologies; they have leveraged existing capabilities and put them together in a way that drives customer benefit for far less input than would have been required in the past. I also need to make it eminently easier for our employees
TECHNOLOGY
GE Healthcare is building digital twins of hospitals, mining data to improve performance at the individual asset and entire network level
to perform their jobs, with better tools and better applications, and in some cases this means completely eliminating non-value-added tasks that no longer need to exist.” Artificial Intelligence as a service For GE Healthcare, technological advancements are a staple of its operations. However, there is particular excitement around AI something the business has been hard at work developing and is now deploying to tremendous effect. “We’re partnering with hospitals around the country. They have
millions of patient records, and in those records are millions of images collected from GE machines,” Koontz explains. “Let’s say, for example, you have a lung condition – we provide algorithms that can identify an issue that might need immediate intervention, allowing the radiologist to more rapidly provide a diagnosis and begin delivering treatment. We use these clinical partnerships to help create the algorithms, and then the radiologist will give us a thousand images of nodules in the lung, creating what’s called curated data. The potential accuracy
www3.gehealthcare.com
9
G E H E A LT H C A R E
James Richards CIO, GE Healthcare
Richards is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for GE Healthcare, based in Chicago, IL. He was appointed to his current role in March 2016. Prior to joining Healthcare, Richards was the CIO, Finance. This role was created in Jan 2014, and was responsible for Enterprise & Finance Systems strategy, operations and deployments across the company. He partnered closely with the Finance, IT, and Global Operations teams in driving these priorities.
12
of these algorithms is over 99 percent.” GE Healthcare now has clinical partnerships that address a number of disease states and focus areas, including lung, brain, cardiovascular, pelvic and women’s health. The company is leveraging its existing advanced imaging capabilities alongside the clinical expertise of its partners to develop algorithms that will aid physicians in the speed and accuracy of their diagnoses. “This is going to be critically important for emerging countries, many of which have
TECHNOLOGY
Through a partnership with University of California San Francisco (UCSF), GE Healthcare is developing a library of deep learning algorithms, one
a shortage of radiologists. This is real, and the solution is being developed today,” Koontz adds. For Zimmerman, ‘artificial intelligence’ is no longer an appropriate term for what the technology has become. “I personally do not believe in artificial intelligence,” he says with a touch of humor, before swiftly expanding on his position. “It’s because A) there’s nothing really artificial about it anymore,
it’s real intelligence, and B) it really doesn’t have any value unless it’s applied to something. Our team and our customers think of it more as applied intelligence. If you apply machine learning to the various data types, insights and intelligence will be born. That intelligence then has to be planted into the workflow of, or the experience of, a consumer, a clinical professional, or a revenue cycle person. So, as
www3.gehealthcare.com
13
Qvera & GE Healthcare Customers Shoulder-To-Shoulder for More Than 15 Years Qvera is proud to be the trusted go-to interoperability partner for GE Healthcare customers through the most revolutionary time in healthcare IT.
O
ver our 15 years of collaboration, interoperability has evolved from interfacing in-house systems to sharing patient data across communities, regions, and states. Qvera’s founding partners began working with GE Healthcare customers back when the products were known as Logician and Paradigm. Today Qvera provides universal interoperability solutions such as bi-directional health registry connectivity in all 50 states, and bi-directional data exchange between GE Centricity® sites and hospital systems such as Epic, McKesson, Cerner, and MEDITECH.
Qvera’s workflows go beyond checking the box to meet government requirements and enhance the GE Centricity user experience, providing doctors what they need at the point of care and improving patient health outcomes. As the healthcare IT landscape continues to mature, we are on the forefront of evolving interoperability standards. Working with HL7 and IHE, we are helping define the standards of the future and driving down the cost of healthcare interoperability.
* Centricity is a registered trademark of General Electric company.
Celebrating Our 15-Year Relationship with GE Healthcare Customers! info@qvera.com
801-335-5101
www.qvera.com
TECHNOLOGY
we invest in understanding data and what it’s telling us, we try hard to do things that make a difference and create better outcomes.” A common source of truth Through its Digital Thread, GE Healthcare has aggressively rationalized its application landscape to achieve these levels of technological advancement. Like any large enterprise, it had evolved from an operation that ran its own data centers and databases and deployed point solutions, leading to thousands upon thousands of applications speaking to each other, making IT incredibly complex. “The mission of Digital Thread is to turn that spaghetti of applications into a consistent global set of pillar applications, which form the foundation of the business,” Richards explains. “When you have a consistent data set across the organization, you have a common source of truth. Then, you can start building applications and analytical tools which sit on the foundation, allowing you to do
incredibly powerful things.” Fully harnessing the data driven by this cleaner, more uniform process is, in Zimmerman’s words, “a wonderfully large, hard problem to tackle.” With 37 years of experience in this industry, he is still thrilled by the advancements he has seen and is continuing to help develop, because he is able to see the ever-improving outcomes from the inside. “One of the biggest challenges is the fact that data is largely defined by individual health systems, meaning there’s a huge quantity of it and it is often highly fragmented. This isn’t just in healthcare, of course – this is across the world at large, and really, it’s only in the early stages of being tackled. You have to be able to understand data in all its forms, so that it can be correlated and applied.”
www3.gehealthcare.com
17
Increase Practice Efficiency Lower Operational Cost Deliver Quality Patient Care Analytics with Error Free Data TriNet Medical has been providing integrated software products, solutions and consulting services to the Healthcare industry since 2009. Our innovative offerings in EMR barcode scanning and inventory management solution with GE Centricity help our customers reduce operational costs, increase practice efficiency and provide enhanced data analytics. Eventually delivering a quality patient care with data accuracy and compliance of their patients’ records. LEARN MORE
Barcode Scanning Solutions for GE Centricity 991 US Hwy 22, Suite 200, Bridgewater, NJ 08807 trinet@trinetmedical.com 908-575-7304
TriNet SRX Medical Tracking System
www.trinetmedical.com
TECHNOLOGY
The art of growth regarding how important technology Part of what helped GE Healthcare is and how increasingly pervasive it grow into its current status as an is, is the intelligent harnessing and industry giant is acquisitions, meaning application of it to make a difference,” a lot of systems have been cleaned up he continues. “To embrace quality, to create consistency. That, combined efficiency, and the ability to be rewarded with the streamlining for the work that you do.” of GE’s own data An example of good systems, meant IT that GE Healthcare a concerted drive has firmly embraced is towards consolidation. cloud computing. Since “The whole idea part of the company’s here is that some digital consolidation was IT energies are the funneling of huge good, some are volumes of information bad,” Koontz says. into taut, legible “We’ve consolidated streams, an effective – James Richards, hundreds of vendors data storage system CIO, GE Healthcare down to four primary was key, and cloud ones, and we’re standardizing our technology met that need. processes into something horizontal.” “Three years ago, if you went to The good and bad IT energies a CIO in a hospital and said, Koontz mentions can be found “What about cloud?”, across the entirety of the digital they would have been landscape, reaching far beyond hesitant,” Koontz GE’s own in-house technology. In says. “Now, Zimmerman’s words, “technology with the in and of itself is a very powerful and dangerous intoxicant.” “I think the challenge we have
“When you have a consistent data set across the organization, you have a common source of truth”
www3.gehealthcare.com
19
G E H E A LT H C A R E
volume of data, they are more than willing to talk about cloud. Whatever the type of data – be it operational, financial, lab, or clinical – hospitals are wanting GE and others to help them process that data in an applicable form.” But it’s not just the elevated level of service it enables GE Healthcare to provide, Richards says. It’s fundamental to GE Healthcare’s success in the future. “If you think about what legacy organizations look like – doing everything ourselves, setting up in our data centers, deploying our own applications across multiple functions and various regions – that complexity does not enable sustainable growth,” he says. “That’s one of the major reasons why we’re pushing for a common foundation for the entire enterprise. By moving to cloud – and 40 percent
20
of our applications are already there – we’ve made huge progress. The real value here is when you build a core foundation where you can rely on data integrity, that enables you to build things that may be very specific given new markets, new customers, and new regions. We can build lightweight capabilities accessible across the globe through a smartphone. That’s how you do sustainable growth.” Change from within None of GE Healthcare’s incredible work toward peak operational efficiency and top-level digital technology would have been possible without the initial step of changing minds from the top down. “There are major change management processes and methods that need to be put in place and should never be underestimated,” Koontz says. Looking at who the company can count on and how the organization moves forward is where change management comes into play, and the vision must be laid out for all. “You say ‘here’s the objective, here’s what we’re trying to achieve,
TECHNOLOGY
here’s why it’s important to the business, and here’s the role I need you to play in that vision’. That communication must be frequent and cascading,” he continues. Of course, all of this would mean nothing without GE Healthcare’s customers, and their patients in turn. Part of Zimmerman’s job, and one of his favorite elements of it in his own words, is engaging deeply with customers: “Those hospitals, clinics, and physicians give me the great privilege of understanding their operations, their challenges, and their needs,” he says. “I am blessed to bridge those two worlds. I get to
bring the best technologies to life, in a way that customers can adopt and use them to achieve better outcomes. That’s my role in life and I’m thrilled beyond words to be able to do this.” Richards adds: “We have to push a willingness to think through what the art of the possible is. There’s an insatiable demand for better patient outcomes, which is what we’re really after here. This goes beyond advancements like making it easier to make restaurant reservations – we’re talking about real lives at stake. “So I think that’s the exciting part – that the demand will always outstrip the supply.”
www3.gehealthcare.com
21
500 W. Monroe Street Chicago, Illinois, USA www3.gehealthcare.com