GE Healthcare has collaborated with Apprise Health Insights to introduce automated statewide hospital bed management solution in the state of Oregon, US.

Oregon is said to be the first US state to implement GE Healthcare’s new statewide command center software solution for hospital capacity and critical resource management.

By using federal grant offered by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Apprise Health Insights has taken the responsibility to deploy the technology platform called the Oregon Capacity System (OCS) at every hospital in the state by summer next year.

Earlier to the project that commenced in March last year, Oregon has tracked and reported capacity information manually, retroactively, and individually that resulted in outdated reports and potentially week-old data.

Oregon’s Statewide Capacity System is using GE’s command centre software to track 7,368 beds and around 800 ventilators across 60 hospitals. It helps to process 4.2 million data points per day, thereby enabling to avoid manual tracking and enter capacity information.

The system enabled to save 45,000 hours of labour for participating hospitals, to date, said the company.

GE Healthcare clinical command centres CEO Jeff Terry said: “GE Healthcare Command Centers help health systems to orchestrate patient care, from the bedside to the department and the health system. This work extends that impact statewide with a broader set of automated real time data than ever before.”

Apprise Health Insights and GE Healthcare are focusing on expansion of the system beyond tracking current beds and ventilators to track and process over five million data points per day.

The data points comprise of acute, paediatric, ICU, specialty, rehab and psych bed availability, in addition to emergency department and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) availability.

The information will be gathered directly from the electronic medical records (EMR) of every hospital in Oregon and placed into the Oregon State Capacity System in near real-time through fully automated option.

Later, the information will be provided to all participating organisations through a website, which can be accessed from any device or projected on a screen and refreshed every five minutes.

The hospital staff can accelerate and escalate transfers to the nearest locations with available beds through accessing capacity data in near real-time.

The operation of the system will be led by the Apprise Health Insights through leveraging GE Healthcare command center software.