Partnership Aims to Give Clinicians Evidence-based Decision Support Tools to Cut Costs, Reduce Radiation Exposure and Help Drive Quality

BARRINGTON, Ill./ Waterloo, On - GE Healthcare took another step forward in its role as one of the global leaders in enabling cost-effective, appropriate imaging, announcing a partnership with a leading provider of Clinical Decision Support for Diagnostic Imaging (CDS-DI), Medicalis, that seeks to help drive quality healthcare and reduce unnecessary imaging procedures and costs. The alignment, which will integrate Medicalis’ CDS-DI solution with GE’s Centricity™ Imaging IT and Electronic Medical Records (EMR) products, will seek to deliver decision support at the physician office’s point of order (EMR) or the radiology provider’s point of service (Imaging IT).

CDS-DI uses industry best practice knowledge designed to help physicians enhance the quality of patient care by ordering the right imaging study the first time. Medicalis’ decision support module is based on the clinical guidelines of the American College of Radiology, American College of Cardiology, American College of Physicians, and the American Society of Spine Radiologists with relevant in-context advice as a provider first places the imaging study order. Patients may benefit by avoiding unhelpful imaging studies, thereby reducing unnecessary radiation exposure and out-of-pocket healthcare expense.

GE Healthcare’s rich history and extensive expertise in diagnostic imaging positions the company as a responsible physician-partner to help clinicians order the right test first. The initiative fits perfectly within GE’s healthymagination campaign, which is built on the global commitments of reducing costs, improving quality and expanding access for millions of people.

“GE is proud to serve as a dedicated partner to government, employee health benefits providers and other stakeholders in lowering rising costs to the healthcare system, while helping to ensure that appropriate patient and provider access to the most effective resources for quality care are maintained,” said Mark Vachon, President and CEO, GE Healthcare Americas. “GE’s new alignment with Medicalis leaves healthcare decisions in the hands of clinicians but adds an additional layer of transparency and accountability for each ordered imaging request. This extra support, we believe, will result in more use of evidence and a reduction of unnecessary imaging tests which, in turn, could fuel lower-cost, higher-quality healthcare.”

“This agreement with GE Healthcare is an important step to providing the best evidence to physicians about the efficacy of imaging across North America” says Ron Kelly, President & CEO of Medicalis. “Better information at the time of decision making leads to more consistent care delivery and significantly reduces the variance of how patients are diagnosed, leading to greater physician confidence, reduced costs, and improved patient outcomes.”

GE Centricity® Imaging Solutions are designed to assist clinicians by accelerating workflow efficiency for clinical applications, innovating enterprise-wide image analysis and facilitating the seamless capture, storage and retrieval of total patient data.

GE’s Centricity® EMR systems are used by more than 33,000 physicians and 900 hospitals and clinics, enabling ambulatory care physicians and clinical staff to document patient encounters, streamline clinical workflow and securely exchange clinical data with other providers, patients, and information systems.

“Better IT strategies are needed for providers to address the variances that currently exist in healthcare as a fundamental driver of costs and quality issues. For Imaging IT, specifically, clinical decision support is integral to the workflow process to provide the best advice at the finger-tips of physicians and improve reimbursement,” said Don Woodlock, Vice President and Global General Manager of GE Healthcare IT. “This partnership with Medicalis enables GE to address this need and further automate radiology workflow. Healthymagination is about reducing costs while increasing quality. Delivering knowledge to the point of care helps with both simultaneously.”