Oregon is the first state to launch a new statewide command center software solution to determine hospital capacity and critical resource management developed by GE Healthcare https://www.gehealthcare.com.
With a HHS grant, Apprise Health Insights https://www.apprisehealthinsights.com will lead the deployment of the technology platform referred to as the Oregon Capacity System (OCS) to every hospital in Oregon by summer 2022.
The COVID-19 crisis has exposed the need for better capacity management across hospitals. Real time data is needed for bed availability. Hospitals struggled during the pandemic as patient surges made worse by natural disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires strained the capacity of ICUs and ERs across the country.
Prior to the beginning of the project in March 2020, hospitals in Oregon like in every other state traced and reported capacity information manually, retroactively, and individually resulting in outdated reports.
Using GE Healthcare’s command center software, Oregon’s OCS is tracing 7,368 beds and approximately 80 ventilators across 60 hospitals, while processing 4.2 million data points each day, which has removed the need to manually track and enter capacity information.
To date, the system has saved participating hospitals 45,000 hours of labor, which amounts to roughly $3 million in productivity and is expected to save even more time as further automation reduces the burden of manual reporting.
Appraise Health Insights and GE Healthcare are expanding the system beyond tracking only current beds and ventilators. The goal is to track and process more than five million data points per day including acute, pediatric, ICU, specialty, rehab bed availability data as well as PPE ED, and ECMO availability.
The information is going to be pulled directly from EMRs at every hospital in Oregon and fed into the Oregon OCS and be fully automated in near real-time while ensuring patient privacy. Information will then be made available to all participating organizations via a website easily accessible from any device or be projected on a screen and refreshed every five minutes. This will enable hospital staff to expedite and escalate transfers to the nearest locations with available beds.