Royal Philips has introduced PerformanceBridge, a new suite of performance management software and services to assist radiology departments in enhancing productivity, improving the patient experience and delivering better value-based care. PerformanceBridge supports radiology department administrators in prioritizing operational improvements in asset management, equipment uptime and utilization, peer-to-peer collaboration, accreditation compliance and practice management. 
 
Designed as a secure, cloud-based or on-premise software solution, Philips’ PerformanceBridge gives healthcare professionals access to near real-time data on departmental performance through an easy-to-use interactive dashboard. Vendor agnostic, PerformanceBridge unifies information across different imaging modalities and existing information systems. To further support continuous improvement management, Philips offers a team of application specialists to help PerformanceBridge users leverage its tools and implement performance improvement strategies based on meaningful insights provided by PerformanceBridge.
 
“As the role of the radiologist continues to evolve, we are committed to delivering next-generation software and services to bring the power of informatics and decision support to radiology,” said Rob Cascella, CEO of the Diagnosis and Treatment businesses at Philips. “Radiology departments have access to a goldmine of data that can positively impact the entire enterprise. PerformanceBridge leverages intelligent software and analytics, blended with expertise, to deliver actionable information to make everything more streamlined in support of a first-time-right approach.”
 
Lahey Hospital & Medical Center based in Burlington, Mass., is a co-development site and early adopter of one of the services of Philips’ PerformanceBridge, namely PerformanceBridge Practice.
 
“PerformanceBridge Practice has incredible promise for data-driven practice management, including exciting things such as a real local market referral pattern analysis, as well as asset and technologist utilization insights,” said Christoph Wald, M.D., Ph.D, MBA, FACR, chairman, Department of Radiology at Lahey Hospital and Medical Center, and professor of Radiology at Tufts University Medical School. “It gives us the intelligence we need to be a data-driven enterprise.”
 
The PerformanceBridge suite includes intelligent tools and personalized service options to enable health systems to drive the value of imaging: 
 

• Understanding and improving imaging performance—PerformanceBridge Practice offers vendor-agnostic, deep, data-backed insights to identify opportunities and gaps within a health system. Following this assessment, Philips acts as a partner in on-going continuous improvement, providing detailed benchmarking and insights to help achieve productivity gains.
• Managing radiation dose—Philips’ dose management software platform, DoseWise Portal, enables healthcare providers to record, track and analyze the radiation exposure of patients and clinicians. Imaging managers have access to information about patient radiation exposure to make data-informed decisions to ensure safe optimized levels and adherence to industry regulations. 
• Participating in knowledge sharing—Through Philips’ NetForum community, clinicians have access to a cloud-based peer-to-peer network, where members can access benchmarking data, case studies and educational information to aid in knowledge sharing and facilitate learning. 
• Proactively addressing equipment issues—PerformanceBridge’s services analytics infrastructure integrates input from 24 different data sources into one consolidated database with more than 40 proactive data analytics algorithms, which analyze system log files on a daily basis to recognize patterns that identify the need for proactive equipment maintenance.

 
PerformanceBridge builds on Philips’ expertise in imaging, clinical informatics, healthcare consulting services, remote services, dose management services and education services. It complements Philips’ Rightfit suite of maintenance services and its SmartPath suite of upgrade services. Philips has an installed base of more than 300,000 imaging systems in more than 100 countries, and 7,000 field service engineers to support Philips customers. 
 
Philips is showcasing PerformanceBridge this week at the Radiological Society of North America 2016 Annual Meeting in Chicago, Ill. PerformanceBridge will be commercially available in the United States, Benelux, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand in 2017.