October 9, 2007 — Researchers in GE’s Healthcare Decision Sciences Lab (HDSL) are working to develop a more seamless healthcare management system, driven inside and outside the hospital and doctor’s office with less bureaucracy and better outcomes.
Researchers are leveraging existing GE technology into healthcare and studying analytical decision supports that will strengthen clinical workflow between these entities to improve medical outcomes and more efficiently manage the costs and labor of care.
The research team is reportedly working to connecting three areas of technology to make this happen, including:
-Low-cost sensors in the home such as scales, motion detectors and activity monitors to keep track of a patient’s activity in the home;
-Electronic medical records; and
-Visualization and decisioning systems, involving algorithms and modeling that can interpret and package the data being gathered from the sensors and the electronic medical records in a way that provides a doctor or caregiver with the best information from which to make critical clinical and process decisions. And it does this without overwhelming care providers with false alarms or difficult to use systems.
The general research idea is to have a set of mechanisms in the home that can gather information about a patient’s condition, and have a system set up for interpreting, packaging and sending that data to the patient’s primary physician or caregiver via an electronic medical record.
For more information: www.gehealthcare.com