GE Promotes EMR Through Patient Safety Organization

So, here’s a vendor move which I’m surprised others haven’t made yet (at least to my knowledge).

GE Healthcare has formed an official Patient Safety Organization, one blessed by HHS and AHRQ, a step which puts its EMR in the hospital buyer’s face without its having to constantly pitch.

As I see it, this is a clever move which not only helps GE gather data useful in refining Centricity, but also helps make sure people don’t think of safety problems when they think EMR.

The PSO works as follows.  GE has brought together sixteen hospitals, most in Rhode Island, to share data on medical errors.  The data will be captured through MERS, a Web-based event reporting system which all participants will use.   To handle heavy-duty data crunching, GE’s PSO is working with SAS, whose job it will be to integrate and analyze root causes that  contribute to risk.

Not only does this promote GE Healthcare’s brand, it also tightens the bond between itself and the hospitals, which may become reliant on the integration and data management capabilities vendor like SAS can supply.  (Somehow, I doubt your average community hospital has SAS  on board;  its products are just too costly.)

All told, a very interesting development.