OREANDA-NEWS. Leveraging the Industrial Internet to better impact patient outcomes, GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE), announced today at the 2013 Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) annual meeting, the launch of Centricity 360*, a GE PREDICTIVITY™ solution. Centricity 360 streamlines clinical collaboration among unaffiliated caregivers and patients to help reduce duplicate testing, avoid unnecessary patient transfers and lower diagnostic imaging distribution costs.

“In our digitally wired world, a 12-year-old can share images and information instantaneously, but your doctor lacks the tools to do the same,” said Jan De Witte, president and CEO, GE Healthcare IT and Performance Solutions. “With Centricity 360, your doctor can liberate the information he or she needs to exchange patient data and images with your care team, who in turn can make fast care decisions, regardless of location.”

Centricity 360 is a professional online collaboration tool for clinicians. Through a suite of on-demand medical imaging applications, distributed care teams can collaborate on patient cases in near-real time. Because the applications and the collaboration tools are available through an enterprise-grade cloud services platform, there is no upfront investment required from clinical users, patients or integrated delivery networks.

“Connecting efficiently with our referral network and giving our clinicians easy access to data without having to send a CD is essential to achieving the best outcomes for patients,” said Dave Roach, vice president of IT and chief information officer for Kadlec Health System in Washington State, a Centricity 360 collaboration partner. “We are excited to work with GE Healthcare to make significant advances in enhancing patient care.”

Addressing the High Cost of Missed Information

Diagnoses are based on patient information. How that information is shared matters. For example, healthcare providers share images via CDs. These CDs get damaged or lost 22 percent of the time. Missing or incorrect information can lead to unnecessary testing and medical procedures and longer hospital stays. More easily accessible and shareable patient data helps clinicians to make more informed diagnoses. Studies suggest that clinician access to prior images can reduce repeat imaging within 24 hours by 17 percent, lowering costs. If a one percent improvement in productivity were achieved, it would drive significant cost savings.

Taking secure cloud capabilities to a new level

GE Healthcare is an experienced global provider of cloud services, managing over 30 billion images and 130 million patient cases worldwide. The company is also the leading vendor of vendor neutral archiving by volume of studies, according to a report by industry analyst IHS entitled “Medical Enterprise Data Storage – World – 2013,”* storing over 165 million studies or about 45 percent of all study volume in 2012 globally.

Centricity 360 gives caregivers easy tools to exchange images and join private communities where they can engage in ongoing diagnosis and treatment discussions. Capable of running on any elastic cloud infrastructure, Centricity 360 is the first solution of its kind, supplying IT managers with virtually limitless storage and computing resources to process data.

“In critical care situations, speed is of the essence,” said Mike Jackman, vice president and general manager, Specialty Solutions, GE Healthcare IT, “but that speed must be secure. Centricity 360 addresses patient privacy with strong encryption protocols for data at rest and in transit. Centricity 360 supports the interoperability and stringent security standards that are locally required in each region.”

Enterprise Support

For radiology departments using Centricity PACS-IW with Universal Viewer, sharing a patient’s case takes just one click from the PACS user interface. For radiology departments who use PACS from other vendors, Centricity 360 complements their current workflows with cloud-based image archiving and sharing services.

Centricity 360 addresses the total cost of ownership challenges posed by traditional on-premise IT systems. It enables fast access to the latest technology, removes the burden of IT management, and allows customers to pay for what they use with no capital investment. Furthermore, GE Healthcare provides flexible deployment options. Customers can choose to use “do it yourself” steps to get started or request tailored implementation services that leverage GE Healthcare’s deep clinical, regulatory and services expertise.


Centricity 360 is available now for select pilot customers in the United States.

*Centricity is a registered trademark of General Electric Company.

Centricity 360 is the newest addition to GE’s Predictivity™ solutions, which harness the power of the Industrial Internet to help industrial organizations achieve peak productivity.