Adar Palis, Executive Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer of Harrison Medical Center, explains, "Working with GE to implement a Health Information Exchange (HIE) supports our 'Vision 2015' strategic priorities around physician and provider alignment, operations redesign, and cultural transformation. GE's HIE platform will help us significantly improve the quality and efficiency of the care our clinician community provides to patients."

Harrison is a not-for-profit hospital offering medical, surgical, and emergency services at five locations—Bremerton, Silverdale, Port Orchard, Belfair, and Poulsbo—to serve the Kitsap and Olympic peninsulas in Western Washington state.

Each year, Harrison supports more than 75,000 Emergency Department visits, 17,000 in-patient visits and 195,000 outpatient visits across its five locations. Having made the technology transition to electronic medical records (EMRs) between 2008 and 2010, Harrison turned to GE's eHealth Solutions for the next phase of information technology leadership. Its goal was to enable information sharing and clinical collaboration across facilities with more than 400 physicians using multiple, different EMR systems, which could not readily exchange needed clinical data.

The eHealth Information Exchange is now live, allowing physicians to search and view patient documents such as history and physicals, lab and pathology reports from within their EMR workflow. GE's HIE solution supports GE Healthcare's own Centricity* EMR, used by Harrison's affiliated physicians, as well as non-GE clinical software products.

Harrison is using MatchMetrix EMPI, developed by NextGate®, for matching and linking patient information in the absence of a common identifier, allowing providers to achieve a single view of patients. NextGate's EMPI uses optimized matching algorithms to identify, index, and resolve related patient records spread over different applications and disparate systems. GE Healthcare and NextGate are working together at numerous customer sites in addition to Harrison.

Earl Jones, Vice President and General Manager of GE Healthcare's eHealth Solutions adds, "We're committed to helping Harrison Medical Center meet near-term goals for its Health Information Exchange and to provide innovative solutions that help Harrison leverage its HIE investment to enhance care team coordination, patient engagement, and chronic disease management as the center grows."

* Centricity is a registered trademark of Genera l Electric Company.

About GE Healthcare
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our broad expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, drug discovery, biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies, performance improvement and performance solutions services help our customers to deliver better care to more people around the world at a lower cost. In addition, we partner with healthcare leaders, striving to leverage the global policy change necessary to implement a successful shift to sustainable healthcare systems.

Our 'healthymagination" vision for the future invites the world to join us on our journey as we continuously develop innovations focused on reducing costs, increasing access and improving quality around the world. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employees are committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries.