Sheikh Khalifa Medical City optimizes MRI capacity through teamwork and GE Healthcare Performance Solutions

GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE), and Sheikh Khalifa Medical City (SKMC) today announced exciting results from a comprehensive joint initiative leveraging GE's Performance Solutions business. This partnership enabled SKMC's management to achieve more visibility on Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) equipment utilization allowing for even higher patient throughput.

Healthcare centers globally are facing the need to reduce costs while improving quality. The United States and Europe have already begun their transformation towards more business-driven healthcare delivery. The introduction of this initiative in the Middle East will enable healthcare providers to improve operational, clinical and management processes by applying proven GE tools and healthcare expertise to the challenges of change in healthcare.

"The global healthcare landscape is changing. Operational excellence is becoming a necessity. This context of change is forcing hospitals to act more like businesses, to look at the quality of their processes while maintaining a high level of clinical care,"

said Raoul Pop, Performance Solutions Business, Middle East Sales Manager at GE Healthcare.

The project at SKMC was launched to further optimize the hospital's newly purchased MR equipment and become a benchmark for other hospitals in the UAE. The staff applied Six Sigma, Work-Out and Change Management techniques to understand how they could streamline scheduling, and in the future, better balance workload between the 4 MR departments in the Emirates. This is to improve communication, reduce delays, and allow the introduction of new procedures.

For this first project with SKMC, results were achieved through the hospital's focused efforts to identify and address opportunities for improvement, assisted by GE Healthcare's experienced consultants. GE consultants bring GE methodology (tools such as Six Sigma, Lean, CAP, Work-Out) into hospitals through projects tailored to specific customer needs. In some cases the methodology is taught to the hospital staff and remains once the consultants have left. Little by little, processes are changed and improved from inside the hospital, by the people working there. This is what helps bring about true operational excellence.

"Monitoring the utilization rate of our new MR equipment was something we did not know how to do in a way tailored to our environment. I knew about Six Sigma and its industrial world applications, and recently learned that GE Healthcare, one of our long-term partners, had successfully deployed it to the healthcare world in the US and Europe, notably through an initiative called Performance Solutions," said Zaid Al Siksek, Director of Health Policy and Regulation, General Authority of Health Services, Abu Dhabi.

Along with putting in place a way to monitor capital investment utilization, GE Healthcare program is typically designed to help hospitals and imaging centers realize measurable improvement in any department, or across the entire hospital.

"GE Healthcare helped us develop a two level dashboard articulated around empowerment of the operational team, and combining instant clear visibility for the management of workflow and quick identification of causes of variations. The General Authority of Health Services of Abu Dhabi intends to use this type of dashboard to establish internal benchmarks from now on," added Al Siksek.

As a result, Sheikh Khalifa Medical City has experienced a wide range of benefits, including clear visibility on team productivity and room utilization, and tools to measure parameters affecting the productivity (cancellations and no-shows). The project also generated a positive atmosphere emphasizing the need for even stronger staff teamwork to serve their patients more efficiently.

"It's exciting and gratifying to see the results that Sheikh Khalifa Medical City in Abu Dhabi is achieving," said Pamela Garrido, General Manager, Performance Solutions Business in Europe at GE Healthcare. "Successful efforts like this make life better for GE's customers and, ultimately, the patients they serve; set higher standards; and go a long way toward transforming the way healthcare is delivered in this region and beyond."