September 17, 2014 — GE Healthcare announced it has installed its Cath Lab Efficiency Manager at Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo. The solution is a new analytical tool that analyzes the performance of an interventional lab, providing hospitals with important data they can use to identify areas of improvement. The Cath Lab Efficiency Manager provides a near-real-time dashboard which displays measures of inefficiency and identifies the factors impacting performance. The tool visualizes where changes can be made to help increase productivity and help improve patient care.
“The interventional lab can be the most valuable and the most costly area of the hospital. While many of the determining factors of cath lab efficiency are known, identifying the factors contributing to interventional lab performance can be challenging,” said Dave Strelow, director of cardiovascular services at Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Hospital. “This new tool gives us the information we need to establish baselines and determine performance outliers. By identifying this information, we can easily make the appropriate adjustments in our lab to reduce inefficiencies and improve overall performance to help lower healthcare costs.”
Data collection using the Mac-Lab and CardioLab recording systems provides an easy way to consistently record stamped procedure logs, staffing and medication information, complication and risk factor details, access type, radiation dose area and fluoro time data in the system. Customers with GE cardiovascular information systems (CVIS) can use this new application to leverage the data they have already collected by establishing baselines for process improvement initiatives.
To produce this data, Cath Lab Efficiency Manager uses powerful analytics developed at GE’s Software Center of Excellence (COE) in San Ramon, Calif. Software COE consists of a team of development engineers, data scientists and user experience designers who design and develop applications for analyzing the performance of urban power grids, aircraft engines and national transportation systems among other applications.
“We’re pleased to have this level of expertise being applied to software for use in the interventional lab. This tool provides visibility to the factors that drive variability and variance from peak performance,” said Don Woodlock, general manager of cardiovascular IT, GE Healthcare. “These sophisticated algorithms can offer cardiologists the freedom they need to concentrate on patients and operate a well-organized cath lab instead of spending time hunting through data to find problems.”
Based on feedback from Saint Luke’s, GE continues to build upon the Cath Lab Efficiency Manager using Agile Software Development techniques to ensure the tool provides useful, intuitive, easy to use and powerful functionality, and to make the solution available to the broader hospital community. “Using this tool is like being in a central command station visualizing the operation of the cath labs in all your hospitals. The tool allows you to visualize your operations, set goals, automatically identify where those goals aren’t being met, automatically identify outlier scenarios that aren’t operating as efficiently as the rest of your organization, and ultimately improve,” said Woodlock.
The Cath Lab Efficiency Manager software was displayed earlier this week at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) scientific sessions in Washington, D.C.
For more information: www.gehealthcare.com
February 15, 2022 
