GE, Intermountain demonstrate Qualibria

After five years of collaborative development between Intermountain Healthcare and GE Healthcare, the pair publicly demonstrated the first fruits of their labors at a Tuesday breakfast news briefing at the HIMSS.

The Mayo Clinic also contributed to the development of the “clinical knowledge platform” the company is now calling Qualibria.

GE, which has been working on the project with Salt Lake City-based Intermountain for five years and Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo for two, had announced the name of the software product on Monday via news release.

“Why is it that it's taken us so long?” said Graham Hughes, a physician and the chief medical officer for information systems for GE Healthcare, asking the obvious rhetorical question. “We had to wrestle with some of the most complex information challenges that the industry has been struggling with for years,” Hughes said.

The work represents 500 man-years of development and incorporates 500 decision-support tools, 20 reference vocabularies and intellectual property accrued by Intermountain from more than three decades of healthcare IT experience, according to Hughes and Intermountain Chief Information Officer Marc Probst, who also attended the briefing. “This is not an electronic medical record,” Hughes explained. “It is pulling data from an electronic medical record and comparing it to best practices.”

Data dashboards were among the product functions demonstrated Tuesday. Stroke patients, for example, would be gathered on one dashboard and have their real-time data pulled from a hospital's electronic medical record with their actual times from admission to performance of a CT scan or the appropriate administration of clot-blocking drugs and comparing them to the times suggested by evidence-based best practices.

“We think this could be a starting point for physicians making their rounds and looking at their patients,” Hughes said.

GE expects to announce general availability of the platform in the second half of 2010, according to Mandy Noschese, GE's general manager for the Qualibria development project.

Officials from GE and Intermountain declined to discuss terms of the development agreement and any payments that might accrue to Intermountain for use of its intellectual property in Qualibria on systems sold to other healthcare organizations.