GE, Cisco join forces to improve patient, asset optimization

By eGov Innovation Editors | Mar 14, 2011

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GE Healthcare Performance Solutions, a provider of end-to-end knowledge solutions to the healthcare industry, and Cisco, a provider of IT networking solutions, recently announced a collaboration to reduce healthcare "waste".

"Waste" or healthcare spending that can be eliminated without reducing the quality of care, as defined by The New England Healthcare Institute, is somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 billion, according to a 2009 Thomson Reuters report.

Divided by the roughly 6,000 hospitals in the US, it amounts to about $117 million of waste per hospital.

Through the new GE-Cisco collaboration, hospitals will have the ability to deploy GE’s AgileTrac platform, integrated with the Cisco Unified Wireless Network (CUWN) and Cisco Context-Aware Software, to track patients, staff and equipment with diverse network technologies, helping to improve the quality of patient care, increase efficiency and control costs.

The combined GE and Cisco solution brings together location information about Wi-Fi clients, tags and wired devices, with proprietary real-time location system technologies (RTLS), regardless of the network provider.

Previously, hospitals operate two separate tracking systems for Wi-Fi and proprietary RTLS technologies. Now, organizations can reduce cost while getting a more complete, consolidated view of assets throughout the hospitals existing structure. By streaming Wi-Fi and RTLS into GE’s AgileTrac platform, hospitals can track and manage the location of patients, staff, equipment, and capacity with confidence.