GE Healthcare IT introduces eHealth Community Desktop solution

GE Healthcare IT, a leading provider of health information technologies, today announced its eHealth Community Desktop, an open standards framework for delivering clinical applications built on top of a connected healthcare community. Its foundation is a portal technology that provides Clinicians and other providers across the healthcare continuum a web-based, simple and easy way to view patient data available within a Health Information Exchange (HIE). The announcement came at this week's annual meeting of the Health Information Management and Systems Society in Orlando.

“Our HIE platform with web-based collaboration applications provides healthcare organizations with the tools to supply the information transparency and solution flexibility to address the pressing needs of a dynamic healthcare industry, including population health management, patient-centered medical home and accountable care.”

Earl Jones, Vice President and General Manager of GE Healthcare's eHealth Solutions business explains, "In line with GE's commitment to improving healthcare delivery, eHealth Community Desktop will help widen access to critical clinical information and insight. Where possible, GE Healthcare integrates clinical data from the HIE directly into provider's existing workflows and familiar EMR screens. Now, multidisciplinary care team members, regardless if they use an EMR or not, can actively track their patient's care, leverage advanced applications provided via the HIE and better support complex care management."

eHealth Community Desktop is a robust and flexible solution that not only serves as an access point to an HIE, but can also enable a healthcare organization to host applications like referrals management and quality benchmarking from GE or a home-grown application like an immunization registry. Moreover, healthcare provider organizations can extend HIE access and applications via eHealth Community Desktop to community clinicians who want to be able to take greater advantage of their health information exchange like interacting with hospital discharge summaries, lab results, radiology images and securely message between providers on the HIE network.

One of GE Healthcare's longstanding HIE customers, Keystone Health Information Exchange (KeyHIE), will go live with eHealth Community Desktop in the second quarter of this year. They will be using the solution to extend the reach of their HIE, strengthen relationships with community physicians in Northeastern and Central Pennsylvania and meet the goals of their recently awarded ONC Beacon Award.

Vishal Wanchoo, President and CEO, GE Healthcare IT, comments, "Our HIE platform with web-based collaboration applications provides healthcare organizations with the tools to supply the information transparency and solution flexibility to address the pressing needs of a dynamic healthcare industry, including population health management, patient-centered medical home and accountable care."

eHealth Community Desktop is the most recent, in a series of product announcements that illustrates GE's investment in delivering solutions to enable healthcare transformation and care collaboration across the continuum.