GE Healthcare develops digital medication system

Waukesha, Wis. - GE Healthcare and Intermountain Health Care, a nonprofit health care organization based in Salt Lake City, announced a joint project for the development of a new electronic medication administration record, also known as an eMAR, which will better enable collaboration by everyone involved in the care of a particular patient.

Physicians, nurses and engineers from GE and IHC will work at a joint clinical research center to be based in West Valley, Utah. The clinical IT will incorporate hand-held devices and bar-coding technologies to automatically validate and document prescribed medications and organize other ministrations.

According to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), adverse drug events result in almost 770,00 injuries and deaths annually in the United States, and cost the nation's hospitals up to $5.6 million each per year. It is believed that computerized monitoring systems like eMAR could reduce those errors by up to 95 percent.

The two companies had previously announced a collaboration to accelerate the adoption of electronic health records among health systems in the United States. In addition, GE is providing its Centricity IT technologies across institutions within IHC ' s network, which serve more than 2 million patients. These installations will enable the widespread use of the new electronic pharmaceutical profile software throughout the IHC network, which is made up of 21 hospitals and 92 clinics.