While a visit to the hospital can be a stressful experience for patients, the system also places significant strain on the care providers who are responsible for keeping care moving.
Today, hospital systems face an increasingly complex operational environment. Inpatient utilization days, the number of days patients spend receiving care in the hospital, are projected to grow 9% over the next decade.1 Adding to the strain, the World Health Organization projects a global healthcare workforce shortfall of 11 million by 2030.2 With hospitals operating under narrow margins, maximizing operational efficiency is important.
Today, GE HealthCare announced the launch of CareIntellect™ for Operations, a new cloud-first, software-as-a-service application that helps health system leaders expand access and enhance the patient experience while helping optimize staffing, capacity, and throughput.
The application brings together hundreds of patient- and operational-level insights from electronic medical records and resource management systems. These inputs include bed availability, patient delays, staffing, wait times, and demand across departments and ancillary services. AI models use that information to provide an hour-by-hour view of potential constraints over the next 72 hours. CareIntellect for Operations then surfaces recommended actions and dynamically prioritizes workflows so teams are better equipped to address emerging operational pressure earlier.
While CareIntellect for Operations helps health systems anticipate and proactively manage resource constraints and bottlenecks, there is a larger story. The offering is built on a digital foundation designed to help customers optimize care delivery.
A common infrastructure
CareIntellect is GE HealthCare’s family of clinical and operational applications designed for deployment on a common, cloud-first digital infrastructure. For a health system, that common foundation can help reduce the work required to connect, secure, deploy, and maintain each new application.
Hospital software has traditionally been implemented on an application-by-application basis — and with great fragmentation there can arise many headaches. Each implementation may require new interfaces to source systems, separate identity and access controls, separate data ingestion mechanisms, and customized processes to keep systems up and running.
Under the CareIntellect vision, healthcare providers can deploy their first CareIntellect application, and then activate additional applications as they become available. This common foundation is meant to help simplify operations: for example, a common identity layer built on open standards can integrate with a customer’s existing identity/SSO environment. In addition, a common foundation can help simplify the integration of new applications.
The capabilities of reusable components
The reusable components that power CareIntellect applications are designed to enable customers to leverage a variety of capabilities from governed services instead of rebuilding the underlying data, security, deployment, and operational layers for each application.
These modular capabilities create a common technical environment for integrating AI, managing diverse clinical data, delivering software, connecting devices, and operating applications at scale. Reusable components can include:
- Data Fabric: simplifies the ingestion, preparation, and integration of diverse clinical and operational data. This helps support unified data access while reducing application-specific data engineering.
- Digital Fulfillment: manages digital product fulfillment, software entitlements, and ongoing maintenance. Hospitals can activate licensed capabilities remotely, helping reduce the coordination and on-site work associated with conventional software delivery.
- Identity and Access Management: provides a consistent login and secure access model across applications. It can connect with an organization’s single sign-on environment while applying shared identity controls, helping authorized users move between services through a more coherent access experience.
- IoT Device Connectivity: supports data transfer and remote management for connected medical devices, including configuration, status monitoring, file exchange, and software updates. This allows device-facing applications and service teams to use a common connectivity layer rather than building proprietary connections for each product.
- Infrastructure, monitoring, and security: Shared infrastructure services address application deployment needs across scalable, multi-tenant, and hybrid-cloud environments. Common monitoring is designed to detect performance and security issues, while anti-malware services inspect data transferred to the cloud. Centralized telemetry and logging give technical teams a consistent view of application services, integrations, and data pipelines.
Together, these components help support a more consistent experience across applications, and allow the underlying technology to evolve without requiring each application team to rebuild core functionality.
For health system leaders, the goal is to create a more manageable path to adopting digital capabilities across care settings while helping reduce duplicated infrastructure and technical burden. By connecting information more readily to the work of clinicians and operational teams, offerings like CareIntellect for Operations deployed on the CareIntellect foundation are designed to help health systems respond to changing patient needs and keep care moving.
