Salt Lake City - GE Healthcare, a $14 billion unit of General Electric Company that is headquartered in the United Kingdom, and Intermountain Health Care, a Salt Lake City-based integrated health care system, announced the organizations' joint project to develop a new advanced electronic medication administration record, also known as an eMAR, which will better enable collaboration among a patient's care team.
According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), adverse drug events result in almost 770,00 injuries and deaths annually in the United States, and cost the nation's hospitals up to $5.6 million each per year. The development of computerized monitoring systems, like eMAR, can reduce up to 95 percent of those errors, also according to AHRQ.
Aimed at preventing adverse drug events and increasing patient safety, the project will involve physicians, nurses and engineers from GE and IHC who will work side-by-side to create the new eMAR at a joint clinical research center to be based in West Valley, Utah. The clinical information technology will incorporate hand-held devices and bar-coding technologies, and will leverage in-depth clinical patient information to automatically validate and document prescribed medications. According to GE and IHC, the new clinical research center, expected to create more than 100 in-state jobs, will provide a central location for researchers to combine IHC's clinical data with GE's clinical IT programs.
In February 2005, GE and IHC announced a $100 million, 10-year collaboration to enhance the patient care process in hospitals and clinics and accelerate the adoption of electronic health records among health systems in the United States. In addition, GE is providing its Centricity IT technologies across institutions within IHC's network, which serve more than two million patients. These installations will enable the widespread use of the new electronic pharmaceutical profile software throughout the IHC network, which is made up of 21 hospitals and 92 clinics.
Source: Business Wire
