Tampa General Hospital, GE Healthcare launch tech-enabled center for patient care

Tampa General Hospital has unveiled CareComm – a high-tech “mission control” clinical command center that uses artificial intelligence and predictive analytics to improve patient care at a lower cost.

The center, developed in partnership with GE Healthcare, features 20 artificial intelligence apps, video walls with 38 large screens, 32 work stations, multiple computer systems and a multi-disciplinary clinical team made up of doctors, nurses and allied health professionals.

Workers on the job in the CareComm at Tampa General Hospital, a care coordination center that brings together representatives from many departments to remove patient roadblocks and streamline the patient experience.

The Tampa General Hospital Foundation donated more than $1 million for the 8,000-square-foot center on the hospital’s main campus. Planning for the center has been underway  for 20 months, and it has been open in a temporary facility since December.

“As we started to roll out a new way of treating patients — looking at analytics, taking data and turning that data into information, taking that information and turning it into knowledge and then taking that knowledge and acting on it — these are some of the things that we’ve been able to achieve in less than a year,” said John Couris, president and CEO, Tampa General Hospital, during the public debut Tuesday morning.

He cited a 5 percent reduction in readmission rates, indicating improved quality of treatment. The average overall cost of admission per patient is down from $9,000 to $8,500, resulting in a savings of $10 million. Service scores are in the top quartile in overall patient satisfaction among hospitals nationwide. A survey of the hospital’s 9,000 employees showed engagement scores was in the 89^th percentile compared to other hospitals across the country, Couris said.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis got the first tour of the new center.

“If you told me we were at Kennedy Space Center in there I probably would have believed you. That’s a good thing,” DeSantis said. “They were telling me how hospitals have always been extremely siloed. No one knows what others are doing … Now they’ve broken down those barriers and are able to achieve efficiencies, and I think that’s great.”

Tampa General, a 1,007-bed academic medical center, is the fourth hospital in the world and the first hospital in Florida to open a command center in partnership with GE Healthcare, the $19 billion healthcare business of GE (NYE: GE).