2 days ago
Inside Hospitals' Digital Command Centers
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content.
During the winter of 2023, staff at Children's Mercy Kansas City were waiting for the "surge": a dreaded period when viral illnesses like influenza and RSV abound, leading to an increase in hospital admissions.
But as the winter bled into 2024, it became clear that something had changed. Children were still getting sick and requiring advanced medical care. However, staff at Children's Mercy weren't "feeling the angst" like they had in years past, according to Dr. Jennifer Watts, the hospital's associate chief medical officer of acute care and inpatient operations.
The difference, Watts said, came from technology. That was the hospital's first year using GE HealthCare's Command Center software, a product that allows it to digitally monitor care delivery and track patients' progress throughout their stay.
It's like the "NASA" control hub for the health system, Watts told Newsweek. During the first winter partnering with GE, Children's Mercy staff began asking, "Is the surge here?"
"They just didn't feel it," Watts said. "We were able to prepare. We were able to have [sufficient] staff present. We got rid of the scramble that typically occurs when you don't prepare for things."
Hospital staff inside Children's Mercy Kansas City's Patient Progression Hub, which uses GE Healthcare Command Center technology to paint a real-time picture of hospital happenings.
Hospital staff inside Children's Mercy Kansas City's Patient Progression Hub, which uses GE Healthcare Command Center technology to paint a real-time picture of hospital happenings.
Children's Mercy Kansas City Patient Progression Hub
Children's Mercy is one of 300 hospitals around the world that use GE's Command Center technology. As hospitals across the U.S. face rising demand for their services—driven, in part, by sicker patients and an aging population—many are turning to these digital "command centers" to improve operational efficiency and polish the patient experience.
Before developing a Patient Progression Hub, driven by GE's tech, Children's Mercy was still dealing with inefficient and outdated processes, according to Watts. Different departments were playing "phone tag" with one another to move patients through the hospital. Information was not centralized, and it was common to see staff with packets of papers in front of them, pinning memos on bulletin boards and communicating with fax machines.
Within seven months of implementing the Command Center technology, the hospital saw an 86 percent reduction in admission delays and cut avoidable bed days by 24 percent—creating capacity for 300 more medical-surgical patients without expanding its facility.
The tech sits atop hospitals' preexisting systems, like staffing platforms and electronic health records (EHRs), to generate a comprehensive, real-time picture of the hospital's caseload and available resources.
"The software really helps connect the strategy to the day-to-day operations," Bree Bush, general manager of GE's Command Center, told Newsweek.
Kristie Barazsu is the president and COO of Duke Health Lake Norman Hospital in Mooresville, North Carolina, and oversees patient flow for Duke Health, which stood up Command Center in 2019. During COVID-19, the health system could use the technology to understand where positive patients were located and deploy personal protective equipment (PPE) from its logistics center.
Command Center also utilizes predictive analytics to help hospitals plan for the future. Duke uses it to forecast the area's census, analyzing overall demand by unit, patient population and information has informed the health system's staffing plan, allowing it to reduce reliance on costly, temporary travel labor—and reducing labor expenses by approximately $40 million to date, according to Barazsu.
Rather than viewing the hospitals within Duke's system as independent entities, a tech Command Center has enabled leadership to get the full picture, she added. The system can now move patients from one hospital to another more quickly, allowing it to free up bed space and accept more transfers from other health systems.
"We're not relying on word of mouth or pagers or systems that don't work well," Barazsu told Newsweek. "There's one source of truth."
Staff coordinate care inside UMass Memorial Health's new Digital Hub.
Staff coordinate care inside UMass Memorial Health's new Digital Hub.
UMass Memorial Health
While some health systems are partnering with a tech provider like GE, others are developing internal solutions to manage demand—and to keep tabs on a broadening menu of digital services.
UMass Memorial Health has been on the forefront of the digital revolution, according to Dr. Eric Alper, its vice president, chief quality and chief clinical informatics officer. The health system was an early adopter of electronic intensive care unit (eICU) technology, which allows ICU staff to virtually connect with a critical care physician on overnight shifts.
But a lot has changed since the advent of eICU tech about two decades ago, Alper told Newsweek. UMass Memorial used to run the service from a basement. Eventually it was supporting 150 critical care beds across the enterprise, and it was time for an upgrade.
The health system recently stood up a new Digital Hub, a 20,000-square-foot home for its eICU services, and several other virtual programs, including interpreter services, remote video monitoring, mobile integrated health, "ED at Home," primary care and the Transfer and Access Center, which coordinates the comings and goings of patients across UMass Memorial hospitals.
It might sound paradoxical to move virtual services to a physical location, but centralizing these operations has allowed for better communication, according to Alper, "We're collaborating more effectively by being in the same space, and that's allowing us to reduce some of the silos."
An urgent care provider conducts a virtual visit from Sanford Health's Virtual Care Center.
An urgent care provider conducts a virtual visit from Sanford Health's Virtual Care Center.
Sanford Health
Across the country in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, leaders at Sanford Health shared similar goals. The system stood up its own 60,000-square-foot Virtual Care Center in November, funded by a $350 million gift from its namesake Denny Sanford.
In April, Newsweek followed up on the initiative with Dr. Dave Newman, Sanford's chief medical officer of virtual care.
"One of the biggest things that the Virtual Care Center has done for Sanford is it emphasized the validity of virtual care and digital health," Newman told Newsweek. "The investment in the center and the space has shown that it's permanent, that this is what we're doing to help our patients, not just today or tomorrow but also 20 years from now."
For Watts at Children's Mercy Kansas City, one incident stands out as a testament to the tech Command Center's importance. Anytime there is a mass casualty event, nearby hospitals need to prepare 20 percent of their beds to accept new patients. That's a challenge for most hospitals, given their daily capacity constraints—but when a shooter opened fire on the Kansas City Chiefs' Super Bowl parade in February 2024, Children's Mercy was able to respond.
"This occurred a mile from our children's hospital, and we had no idea up front how many victims we would be receiving," Watts said, "but we were able to use the results of [Command Center predictive] modeling to get us to a point where, yes, we could take 20 percent of our beds and treat all of the victims that may be coming through our doors."
She's excited to see hospitals' virtual command centers and digital services grow, saying, "I think we have opened the Pandora's box here."
