Helping fix hospitals so they can better fix patients

In the world of doctors and nurses, the term “performance solutions” is all about finding rigorous, measurable new ways to be more efficient, standardize care, reduce errors, and drive continuous improvement by tapping into, and learning from, the volumes of data that are produced daily in treatment settings. The result can be lower costs, better deployment of critical resources, and a chance to treat more patients. For the patient, it simply means better, safer care. As seen in the video below, those big themes were the subject of a daylong healthymagination thought leadership summit on hospital efficiency in New York City yesterday that featured a range of speakers and panel discussions on everything from the role of technology to how to foster cultural shifts in hospitals. As GE Healthcare CEO John Dineen told the audience: “A lot of the discussion has really been on the challenges and the problems — on the worst examples in healthcare and the bottom 10 percent. We want to flip that a little bit. We want to have a more optimistic discussion and we want to introduce you to what we believe is the top 10 percent — the aspirational leaders in the healthcare industry with some of the ideas and technologies that are being put to use to make healthcare better.”

For the event, GE also launched its latest healthymagination data visualization — which is part of our ongoing efforts to simplify complex data and make it easier to use for more people. The Measuring Hospital Quality data visualization, below, draws on data from The Joint Commission, which is an independent, not-for-profit organization that accredits and certifies more than 17,000 healthcare organizations and programs in the U.S. It’s our second partnership with designer Lisa Strausfeld, a partner at Pentagram.

How healthy are our hospitals?: Using the data visualization shows that University Hospital of SUNY Upstate Medical University scores above average when it comes to giving heart attack patients a key medicine upon discharge. But the hospital scores below average when it comes to letting patients have antibiotic treatments more than 24 hours after surgery, which is usually not recommended. A drop down menu lets you explore how the hospitals in your state are performing. Click the chart to launch the interactive tool.

“Healthcare systems in the U.S. and around the world cannot be characterized as well oiled machines,” Dineen said. “They are plagued with process inefficiencies and massive variance. These two things, variance in particular, are the fundamental drivers of higher costs and poor quality. I am an industrial guy and when I hear cost problems, quality problems… I get excited. That spells opportunity.”

Spotting trends in the data and acting upon it was a theme underscored by Tim Brown, head of design and innovation consulting firm IDEO. “You can’t improve it without being able to measure it,” he told the audience. Citing simple new ways to use technology, such as wi-fi enabled bathroom scales that send your daily weight to a trend chart on your smart phone, he said weight loss and better health can become infused in daily life.

The need to stop talking about problems and begin using the mountains of actionable data already available, with off-the-shelf tools, was a message hammered home by Asif Ahmad, CIO of Duke University Health System. “There is stuff everybody can do today” to start tackling the problems, he said. Dr. Mark Chassin, President of The Joint Commission, said the goal of his work, and best practices forums such as this event, were to help take the learnings from a small number of hospitals and translate it into usable information for the other 90 percent of hospitals — to break “the barrier of transfering knowledge,” he said.

Room for improvement: In the data visualization, each square represents one of 30 measures in five categories: surgery, pneumonia, heart attack, heart failure, and children’s asthma. Dark green indicates a 100 percent score, light green indicates above average performance, yellow is at average, and red indicates below average for that particular measure. Click on the chart to launch the visualization.

At the forum, John also announced the launch of GE Healthcare Performance Solutions, which will be a new GE Healthcare business that links GE’s leading clinical knowledge base with our operational improvement, IT and change management programs. The goal is to enable new ways of organizing, measuring and managing healthcare delivery. As part of that launch, GE is investing an additional $25 million annually in R&D, as well as adding more than 100 new employees over the next year to develop new clinical solutions.

As Bloomberg News reported in its story on the new business unit, “the GE Healthcare Performance Solutions division may reach $1 billion in annual sales in five years amid the demands of reform in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.” As John told Bloomberg: “When you look at the technologies in our businesses, they go beyond patient care — these serve healthcare systems, not just the doctor, not just the patient or the individuals.”

* Launch the Measuring Hospital Quality data visualization
* Learn more about the philosophy behind data visualization with Ben Fry
* Read more healthymagination stories on GE Reports
* Read coverage in The Financial Times

Learn more in these GE Reports stories:
* “Visualizing health with The Economist Intelligence Unit”
* “Spotting data disconnects with Health of Nations index”
* “GE systems boost cancer center case capacity by 900”
* “Inside the revolution at Intermountain Healthcare”
* “How an affinity for efficiency saved Virtua Health $25M”