GE Healthcare and Hartford HealthCare have launched a collaboration that will stand the test of time.
The organizations are working on a seven-year initiative that aims to improve patient wait times and the overall patient experience.
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“It’s a very collaborative approach,” Helen Stewart, managing principal of GE Healthcare Partners, told MedCity in a phone interview. “Together we can accomplish more in working to improve healthcare than either organization could do on its own.”
Through the collaboration, GE Healthcare will assist in implementing Hartford HealthCare’s Care Logistics Center, which works to reduce patient wait times and boost provider-facility communication.
The collaboration involves a series of projects that will work to give patients better access to care, develop digital imaging services and utilize GE Healthcare’s analytic capabilities to move toward more efficient care.
With this improved patient experience comes an improvement in cost savings, too. The organizations anticipate that over its seven-year span, their collaboration will provide over $14 million in savings.
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But it’s not all about the cost savings, Stewart stressed. It’s also about the quality of care and patient outcomes. “The thing that’s crystal clear is [the collaboration] is focused on outcomes,” she said. “It’s about delivering better care and a better patient experience while making it more efficient.”
It wasn’t an accident that GE Healthcare and Hartford HealthCare ended up together. GE Healthcare was looking for a specific type of client with which to work.
“Clients need to have an appetite to truly partner,” Stewart said. She also mentioned the clients have to have an “organizational readiness” before a collaboration is launched. “We’re looking for organizations that are ready to behave differently,” she said. Finally, GE Healthcare and the client have to dually identify a problem that they can work together to solve.
Hartford HealthCare in Connecticut had each of those qualities.
The collaboration also highlights another one of the organizations’ shared goals: disruption. “We believe there’s going to be disruption in healthcare,” Stewart said. “So does Hartford. This was intentionally designed to force both of us into disrupting the space of our own models.”
Because the collaboration lasts so long, its success will be measured in a variety of ways. The first is through metrics, including those involving cost reduction and maintenance of the quality of care. The second involves the relationship itself, which Stewart noted requires a high level of trust. However, Stewart said GE Healthcare’s role will not be a duplication of what a third party is doing to help Hartford HealthCare. “Our belief is there is plenty of room in healthcare for a lot of people to be involved in working on these problems,” she said.
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