GE launches ehealth platform

GE Healthcare has launched its next-generation e-Health Solutions platform – which includes expanded services for health information exchange, a clinical portal and a patient health management system.

The new platform is designed for international as well as domestic GE Healthcare customers and is said to be adaptable for regional markets in either hosted or deployed models.

“Healthcare professionals around the world recognize that connecting the healthcare IT ecosystem has enormous potential to improve the quality of health outcomes and to reduce costs,” said Vishal Wanchoo, president and CEO of GE Healthcare IT.

“Our new eHealth Solutions platform builds upon our years of experience in clinical information exchange, can help our domestic customers leverage their existing software while helping them meet several meaningful use criteria, and provide our global customers with a foundation and toolset for building national-level EHR infrastructure.”

The new eHealth Solutions platform builds upon the highly flexible infrastructure from GE’s strategic partner InterComponentWare (ICW). The platform contains features that help assist providers in managing patient consents and privacy controls, provider notifications and security.

At the core of the new eHealth Solutions platform is the eHealth Information Exchange (HIE) — a standards-based HIE infrastructure that integrates clinical data from across disparate systems and manages the wide variety of clinical records, document types and terminologies pervasive in today’s healthcare system.

Sitting on top of the platform are applications including the eHealth Clinical Portal and eHealth Patient Health Manager (PHM). The eHealth Clinical Portal provides clear visibility into aggregated data from the HIE for the care provider.

The PHM is a web-based tool for patient engagement. Patients can use the online tool to access their clinical data, record data such as weight, glucose levels and blood pressure readings, and then share this information with their medical team or family members through controlled data access.

Wanchoo said: “Our platform securely delivers complete longitudinal, cross-community patient records for care providers, and integrates directly into clinical workflows.”

Further applications are planned to take advantage of the flexible coding tools embedded in the eHealth Solution platform.

The eHealth platform is being marketed worldwide to care providers, IDNs, HIEs and governments and will support standards-based connectivity with GE’s Centricity family of products, as well as non-GE products.