GE Healthcare contracted to build at a UK National Health Service (NHS) teaching hospital.

In the hopes of achieving greater efficiency, the 800-bed Bradford Infirmary, a teaching hospital   for the UK’s National Health Service, is having GE Healthcare build a centralized healthcare “command center” to direct patient care delivery and allocate resources.

The intention is for the command center, using artificial intelligence and real-time information and analytics, to identify potential bottlenecks and inefficiencies and make recommendations for actions that will lead to improvements. The information will be streamed to large wall monitors, tablets and mobile devices.

The goal is to get patients to be ready to leave the hospital sooner (96% of beds are in regularly in use), increase the number of patients that are treated and reduce the time it takes to process people that come into the emergency room (about 125,000 people annually, an increase of more than 40% in the last 10 years) to within four hours.

While command centers are used at hospitals in the United States and Canada, the new installation in the UK hospital will be the first of its kind in Europe. At Johns Hopkins Hospital, the command center has resulted in significant reductions in patient transfer times, ER wait times and wait times for transfers to post-surgical beds. 

“Hospitals are increasingly looking to boost the efficiency of their operations so they can continue to deliver high-quality care as patient volume increases,” said Mark Ebbens, European command center lead at GE Healthcare. “Command centers help to orchestrate the delivery of care across the organization, bringing consistency to processes, prioritizing actions, eliminating waste and predicting tomorrow’s pressure points,” he added.

GE plans to have the center operational early in 2019.