GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric Company, and Abu Dhabi’s Sheikh Khalifa Medical City (SKMC) recently announced “exciting” results from a comprehensive joint initiative leveraging GE’s Performance Solutions business. 

The partnership enabled SKMC’s management to achieve more visibility on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) equipment utilisation allowing for even higher patient throughput. 
“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 optimise the hospital’s newly purchased MR equipment and become a benchmark for other hospitals in the UAE. The staff applied Six Sigma, workout 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 was done 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. 
Zaid Al Siksek, director of Health Policy and Regulation, General Authority of Health Services, Abu Dhabi, observed: “Monitoring the utilisation 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.”
Siksek said GE Healthcare helped his organisation 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,” he added.
As a result, Sheikh Khalifa Medical City has experienced a wide range of benefits, including clear visibility on team productivity and room utilisation, and tools to measure parameters affecting the productivity (cancellations and no-shows). The project also generated a positive atmosphere emphasising the need for even stronger staff teamwork to serve their patients more efficiently.