Tampa General Hospital (TGH), in partnership with GE Healthcare, reports a $40M reduction of system-wide inefficiencies since launching their CareComm command center with GE’s Command Center Software last August. Utilizing 20 artificial intelligence applications (aka Tiles), CareComm helps to optimize minute-to-minute patient care operations with real-time actionable information used in CareComm and throughout the hospital.
CareComm’s Tiles include Patient Manager, Capacity Snapshot, Surgical Tube Map, Observation Manager, Discharge Barriers, Imaging Expediter and more. CareComm also created a digital twin of patient flow at TGH which was used to reallocate nursing unit capacities and optimize the surgical block schedule. More than anything, CareComm’s work has been to serve and enable TGH’s caregivers and care teams.
The program has helped TGH to operate at maximum occupancy, decrease average length of stay by eliminating 20,000 excess days, and reduce emergency room diversion by 25% for the level one trauma center that serves the entire West Coast of Florida. These improvements equate to 30 beds of additional capacity.
“CareComm is not only the center of gravity for our artificial intelligence platform, it’s the center of gravity for the entire hospital system,” said John Couris, CEO of Tampa General Hospital. “We feel sometimes that to fix a problem, we’ve got to build a building or build more capacity. We started to think a little differently saying, how do we drive value to the consumer by doing better with what we have and not just simply building more.”
“When CareComm opened in August 2019, a hurricane was approaching, and we talked about it being helpful during the storm. We didn’t discuss a pandemic, but it’s been a remarkably useful tool in the management of COVID-19 as well as for daily patient care operations,” said Everett Cunningham, CEO of U.S. and Canada, GE Healthcare. “GE Command Centers are now operating in over 200 hospitals worldwide helping health systems and governments through COVID-19.”
In addition to GE’s real-time Tiles, the CareComm team rapidly implemented an early warning system to help anticipate COVID-19 hotspots in the community. And TGH worked with health systems in the local area to share capacity between them through each surge of COVID-19 patients.
“CareComm guides our hospital along the path of automating care delivery. Over the past year, our team gathered valuable patient insights from our command center which we’ve been able to apply to managing reduced length of stay and better patient flow for all patients – especially in the evolving era of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Dr. Peter Chang, vice president for care transitions, Tampa General Hospital.
TGH is also co-leading a statewide collaboration with other Florida health systems and GE Healthcare to manage beds, ventilators and COVID-19 hospitalizations in near-time called the Florida Capacity System. This new cloud-based system is live and will help to manage the pandemic as well as hurricanes and other challenges in the future.
“The COVID-19 crisis requires a regional response. We’ll keep working together with the Florida healthcare systems and have agreed to share information, messaging to the public, coordinate activities, share resources and innovate and support our communities together,” said Couris. “When it comes to safeguarding the health and wellness of the community, you must transcend competition and collaborate.”
