Vienna — 6th March 2014 — GE Healthcare, a unit of GE (NYSE: GE), today announced at the European Congress of Radiology (ECR) in Vienna the findings of a new European study showcasing compelling evidence around the value predictive maintenance service software offerings can bring for clinicians, hospitals and patients.
The research analysed technical data from over 2,500 service events across 136 European CT installations over a two year period before and after the implementation in the GE servers of GE’s ‘OnWatch’[1] software which proactively monitors the technical parameters of medical equipment such as MR, CT, X-ray, Interventional, Mammo and systems around the clock. The results show that OnWatch software helps reduce downtime, the time it takes to fix a problem and minimize disruption to procedures, in turn helping to save money and potentially increase departmental productivity.
The principal finding was that OnWatch software enabled unplanned downtime rate to be reduced by an average of 32 percent. The software also enabled a reduction in average time to service of 21 percent, with the average number of overall disruptions being reduced by 13 percent. Ultimately, for healthcare providers with a system operating 24/7, on a theoretical basis, these improvements could translate into more than 55 hours of increased system availability per year, offering a potentially significant impact on patient throughput and productivity.
“Before we implemented this latest OnWatch release in 2013, we undertook extensive market research to understand the issues faced by hospital department heads and c-suite executives in hospitals in Germany, Italy and the USA,” explained Jean-Marc Peyronnet from the Global Services team at GE Healthcare. “The main priority for everyone was to find a way to prevent system downtime when a device malfunctioned because of the negative impact that had on patient care, safety and on workflow productivity.”
“Respondents told us that there was a gap in the market for a truly predictive and proactive system which would enable 24/7 monitoring, performance and error information, and allow service engineers to remotely log-in and review error logs. This is what this latest OnWatch software, as part of our ‘One Services’ offering in Europe, was designed to deliver. This research demonstrates that the technology achieves all of these things and more” said Jerome Descheirder, Chief Marketing Officer, GE Healthcare Services Europe.
“The true value of OnWatch is that it is a tangible example of the Industrial Internet in action. It works by capturing and analysing technical data generated by the equipment (electronics, mechanics, etc), and then uses it to predict how it is going to perform in the future. This enables the impact of unplanned disruption to be minimised and replaced by planned corrective action at the most convenient time. As a result it helps clinicians and hospital management to achieve greater efficiency and productivity, while ultimately contributing to improve patient care” he concluded.
ENDS
[1] Trademark of General Electric company
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https://www.ge.com/news/press-releases/predictivity-precursor-productivity-says-ge-research