Big Data to the Rescue: GE Medical Event Reporting System Helps Doctors Weed Out Medical Errors

May 16, 2012 7:00 PM ET
Campaign: Health at GE
Doctors Using GE's Medical Event Reporting System

Data to the Rescue

When New York Police Department cracked on crime in the 1990s, it deployed CompStat, a process that crunched police data and spotted bad blocks and street corners. Cops then swooped in and cleaned them up. Now GE’s Medical Event Reporting System, or MERS, does something similar. It devours medical data and lets hospitals track errors and close calls to floors and wards with drop-down menus and mouse clicks.

The problem is grave. Medical errors cause as many as 98,000 deaths and cost American medical providers an estimated $29 billion annually.

Read how GE Healthcare’s MERS tackled the problem on GE blogs.