Sutter Health and GE HealthCare today announced a seven-year strategic partnership, known as a Care Alliance.
The long-term collaboration will increase access to essential diagnostic care across California, USA, providing patients with advanced technology in their own communities that can help enable quicker appointment scheduling, accelerated diagnostic imaging scan results, early diagnoses, greater convenience, and more consistent and timely care. This Care Alliance marks one of GE HealthCare’s largest ever enterprise strategic partnerships, a recent press release states.
For Sutter, this alliance will help achieve faster access to novel equipment and technology solutions, as well as provide an innovative service delivery model with enhanced, reliable equipment availability. It is grounded in key goals, including expanded access to care, improved patient experience, more consistency regardless of care location, increased patient capacity, greater system integration and interoperability, and a timely refresh of needed equipment. It centres on several areas of collaboration, including optimised technology, an innovative service delivery model, advancing service line care at destination centres of excellence and digital integration.
“This strategic partnership is rooted in our commitment to providing innovative, high-calibre care to our 3.5 million patients across Northern California and the central coast,” said Warner Thomas, president and chief executive officer of Sutter Health. “We’re responding to what we’ve heard from our physicians and making comprehensive upgrades with the latest technology to boost our capacity and expand access points. This collaboration ensures that no matter where patients enter the Sutter Health system, they’ll receive seamless and coordinated care.”
The first key focus area of the Care Alliance is an accelerated technology programme across the Sutter Health system that will focus on some of the most advanced artificial intelligence (AI)-powered imaging technology and digital solutions available to patients, including PET/CT, SPECT/CT, MRI, CT, X-ray, nuclear medicine and ultrasound. GE HealthCare’s interventional, mammography, diagnostic cardiology, maternal and infant care and anaesthesia solutions will also be included in Sutter Health’s ambulatory care centres, helping to address the growing need for care outside of the traditional hospital setting. This comprehensive technology refresh covers the breadth of GE HealthCare’s portfolio of solutions, providing clinicians with innovative options to meet changing patient needs more efficiently and quickly.
“We are committed to support Sutter Health in its mission and have deep respect for their openness to a collaboration that meets the heart of their needs,” said Catherine Estrampes, USA and Canada president & chief executive officer at GE HealthCare. “This Care Alliance is a customised, clinician-focused approach aligned with our shared goals. It was jointly designed with expert assessment of how we provide our latest imaging technology in the right settings to serve patients most efficiently throughout their care journey, closer to home. We look forward to supporting Sutter Health physicians and clinicians in delivering enhanced patients’ outcomes.”
