Alfred Health Becomes First in Southern Hemisphere to Adopt GE HealthCare’s Command Center Software Proven to Optimize Operations

GE HealthCare announced that Alfred Health in Melbourne will be the first health service in the Southern Hemisphere to adopt GE HealthCare’s Command Center software system.

Alfred Health has entered a collaboration with GE HealthCare to improve the connection between its hospitals and community services by using Command Center to help enable rapid and informed decision-making with well-integrated critical data and key personnel in a co-located environment. By centralizing information and leveraging digital systems, the system is designed to enhance situational awareness, communication, and overall operational and clinical efficiency.

GE HealthCare’s Command Center software supports hospital systems by simplifying the orchestration of patient care, including balancing the competing demands from all service points across the hospital system.

The Alfred hospital – part of Alfred Health – is home to Australia’s busiest trauma center and Victoria’s largest Intensive Care Unit. The health service also operates 18 statewide services and Command Center will use AI and machine learning to help optimize capacity to manage high patient volumes and complex cases efficiently, while supporting the expansion of remote care as demand grows.

Command Center is part of GE HealthCare’s AI-enabled portfolio. Using a suite of specialized tiles—discrete applications that live within the platform—Command Center integrates streaming data from electronic management records (EMRs) and other source systems to help healthcare providers match patients with the right bed quickly. Command Center software helps provide healthcare staff with network-wide visibility and planning tools with potential to improve access to care, conserve resources, and enhance operational efficiency. These applications enable teams to take action with real-time insights and help teams consider adjustments based on the system’s predictive insights for patient census. GE HealthCare’s Command Center has been implemented in over 300 hospitals across the USA, Canada, the UK, Turkey, and the Netherlands, where it has helped optimize hospital operations and improve patient care management.

“We are thrilled to help Alfred Health enhance their system-wide efficiencies for the benefits of patients and their care teams with our Command Center software,” said Amit Yadav, GE HealthCare President & CEO ASEAN, Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

“In health systems where it has been adopted, it improves operational efficiency to support frontline caregivers, helps to streamline patient flow, predict bottlenecks and delays, and balance workloads and resources. The system can support hospitals’ goals to ensure that patients are treated in the wards best suited to manage their often-complex care, with the potential to reduce the need for additional wards and beds. Command Center helps operational leaders manage hospital-wide efficiency and improve care coordination through advanced algorithms and real-time insights, which could ultimately enhance hospital performance.”

Alfred Health Chief Executive Adam Horsburgh said healthcare is well-suited to harnessing intelligent computer systems that can process vast amounts of patient and hospital data in seconds.

“We are here to provide our patients with excellent and compassionate care, and to be able to do that in the most effective and timely way possible. As our services continue to grow, and are offered in more and more locations, this exciting project promises to support us in continuing this effort for our community,” Mr Horsburgh said.

GE HealthCare Command Center was first launched in 2016. Since then, it has helped hospital operators realize significant operational efficiencies, including reducing costs and patient length of stay: https://www.gehccommandcenter.com/current-outcomes

At the heart of the Command Center is its use of real-time data, where information in tiles (web apps) provides actionable information. In an acute care context where orders, results, locations, and statuses are changing constantly, such timeliness is key to streamlining workflows and improving efficiencies in the system.

“The timeliness enabled by Command Center is markedly different from current practices in health systems. Command Center, using AI, helps to connect the dots across systems in near real time to help predict, spot risks, and prescribe action,” Yadav says.

Alfred Health will begin with a complement of tiles in the Command Center Software Platform, focused on current and forecasted capacity management, patient flow and care delivery.