Fit for the COVID Fight: GE Healthcare Expands Ultrasound Family with New Point of Care System and AI Offering

Driven by pandemic realities and clinical demand for portable and intelligent point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS), GE Healthcare today unveiled Venue Fit™, a streamlined and compact POCUS system, alongside an industry-first AI offering for cardiac imaging on the Venue™ and Venue Go™. The Venue Fit is the smallest system in GE Healthcare’s Venue Family, featuring an easy-to-clean touchscreen, intuitive scanning tools, and a small footprint designed to fit in tight spaces often found in point-of-care settings.

The Venue Fit and associated AI come at a time where clinicians are relying on point of care ultrasound to combat the more than 127 million COVID-19 cases worldwide.¹ Offering portability, real-time images, cleanability and workflow efficiency, POCUS has become an essential tool enabling clinicians to quickly triage and monitor patients in and outside of COVID wards. Accordingly, GE Healthcare saw orders for its existing Venue Go system increase more than fivefold in 2020 compared to the year prior.²

"COVID-19 has had a huge impact on my practice as we’re currently seeing a surge in the emergency department, and I’ve been taking my Venue Go with me everywhere I go,” said Dr. Joseph Minardi, Chief of the Division of Emergency and Clinical Ultrasound and Director of the Center for Point-of-Care Ultrasound at a West Virginia academic medical center. "With the new Venue tools, I don’t have to struggle with the interface to be efficient. I can bring the device in with me, scan the patient, and using the Lung Sweep and RealTime EF (ejection fraction), I have the information I need right away.”

The new Venue Fit ultrasound system helps meet the needs of providers in tight spaces needing quick imaging insights. It’s smaller in size, but still provides the same Venue Family image quality, touchscreen, intuitive interface, and real-time documentation software that can save time and boost clinical confidence.

In addition to the release of the Venue Fit, the existing Venue Go and Venue ultrasound systems will now offer an industry-first AI tool for cardiac scanning with an integrated quality indicator, RealTime EF, alongside new software applications:

• RealTime EF, the industry’s first AI tool that continuously calculates the heart’s real-time ejection fraction, a measurement of the heart’s ability to pump blood effectively, during live scanning with an integrated quality indicator that helps users know when they have an adequate view to generate accurate measurements of this critical cardiac measurement. The tool can help reduce the need for ECGs and support clinical confidence.
• Lung Sweep, a rapid visualization tool that provides a dynamic panoramic view of the entire lung. This tool automatically activates at the start of each sweep when the probe is tapped on the body and deactivates at the end of each sweep when the probe is lifted, so there’s no need to touch the screen. The Auto B-lines tool can be used in conjunction with Lung Sweep to highlight B-lines over the entire panoramic view and display the frame with the most B-lines per rib space.
• Renal Diagram, a simplified, intelligent documentation tool that allows clinicians to select labels from a prepopulated list that correlates with the images captured, making it easy for other clinicians to follow up on patients with suspected kidney infection.

"This past year we’ve seen point of care ultrasound take a prominent place at the bedside for clinicians, driven by its intuitive design and AI-powered diagnostic prowess,” said Dietmar Seifriedsberger, general manager of Point of Care Ultrasound at GE Healthcare. "Understanding healthcare’s growing resource constraints and the challenges of today’s world, we’re expanding our Venue Family and offerings to help improve our customer’s workflow efficiency and diagnostic confidence.”

For information about the Venue Fit, the new software offerings, and to access the Venue Family interactive educational platform visit: https://venue-pocus.gehealthcare.com/

About GE Healthcare:

GE Healthcare is the $18 billion healthcare business of GE (NYSE: GE). As a leading global medical technology and digital solutions innovator, GE Healthcare enables clinicians to make faster, more informed decisions through intelligent devices, data analytics, applications and services, supported by its Edison intelligence platform. With over 100 years of healthcare industry experience and around 50,000 employees globally, the company operates at the center of an ecosystem working toward precision health, digitizing healthcare, helping to drive productivity and improve outcomes for patients, providers, health systems and researchers around the world. Follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Insights, or visit our website www.gehealthcare.com for more information.

¹ Accessed on 2/8/2021: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
² GE Healthcare Data on File

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