Reducing medical errors, improving quality of care

SAS, the leader in business analytics software and services, and GE Healthcare, have entered into a joint development and marketing agreement by which GE Healthcare will leverage SAS technology to analyse and deliver relevant, detailed patient safety information to help hospitals address preventable adverse medical events.

Applying robust SAS Analytics will enable GE's Patient Safety Organisation (PSO) to mine the data and provide critical insights, best practices and benchmarking that informs change at healthcare institutions.

GE's PSO collects, analyses and aggregates patient safety adverse events and near misses to identify root causes of risk. By applying industry-leading data warehousing and business intelligence technologies from SAS, the PSO member hospitals will receive information about their data to help identify the root causes of risk, enabling members to make lasting safety improvements. When adverse event data is identified, the GE PSO can share critical information, such as trends or risk areas, without compromising privacy standards.

PSO members will collect and report adverse event data through a single, common Web-based Medical Event Reporting system (MERS). MERS enables members to not only capture more event reports and near misses, but to also capture more data in each report on a common platform. The PSO attempts to identify factors contributing to increased risk by looking across large numbers of hospitals. It will share findings among members, who can apply that knowledge before errors occur.

"The success of a PSO lies on the quality and quantity of the data collected. The data is the catalyst that will lead to great insight into meaningful ways to conduct patient safety activities and prevent medical errors," said Jan De Witte, President and CEO, GE Healthcare Performance Solutions. "GE's collaboration with SAS is a critical component to the GE PSO and a differentiator in the in-depth reporting members will benefit from. Together, we will work to help hospitals make lasting safety improvements."

"GE's commitment to the rigorous analysis of patient safety data, to improve the quality of healthcare, is consistent with SAS' mission to provide a robust solution for data analysis," said Carl Farrell, Executive Vice-President of SAS Americas. "We look forward to working with GE Healthcare on this important project and playing a role in helping providers make more strategic, informed decisions to improve patient safety."