October 8, 2018 — CHI Franciscan Health and GE Healthcare have joined forces to implement a NASA-style "Mission Control" command center to effectively and efficiently synchronize all elements of a patient's hospital experience. The artificial intelligence (AI)-powered system will support caregivers to enhance patient safety, orchestrate seamless care delivery and, ultimately, get patients back home sooner.
CHI Franciscan will be the first hospital system in the state of Washington – and the fifth globally – to utilize this technology to improve patient care.
"We're leading the way in Washington with our state-of-the-art Mission Control Center, which will allow CHI Franciscan to provide a much higher level of sophistication and efficiency in our hospitals," said Ketul J. Patel, CEO, CHI Franciscan Health. "We will be able to simultaneously monitor every single patient in our system and utilize real-time data to tailor their experience to provide the highest quality care."
The Mission Control Center will use AI and predictive analytics to optimize care coordination, speed care delivery and improve the patient experience, while maintaining patient privacy. The system works by looking at each individual hospital as part of a larger system, continually examining real-time data and using machine learning to recommend actions that can predict and prevent risk, balance staff workload and streamline the discharge process so patients can get home sooner.
From the Mission Control Center, licensed providers will monitor and leverage analytic apps, or "tiles," to optimize patient care operations at each facility, and trigger actions to best leverage resources across the system. Each tile is carefully crafted to solve a specific issue, taking into account the highly nuanced real-world challenges of caregivers and patients. For example, one tile will help streamline the discharge process by monitoring all patients scheduled for discharge and identifying and addressing "pinch points" that can cause significant and preventable delays. The key is that the real-time data in the tiles is predictive and actionable.
"Often, patients scheduled for discharge just need one more test, such as a CT [computed tomography] scan, for the doctor to review," said Jessica Kennedy-Schlicher, MD, medical director for care transformation at CHI Franciscan. "The people scheduling the CTs are running through a list of patients, often as first-come first-served. Mission Control will be able to prioritize the list and flag patients to move up on the list. By optimizing the process, we can speed care delivery and get patients home sooner."
"The purpose of any new technology in health care is to enable providers to deliver better care, bringing doctors and nurses closer to their patients," Patel said. "Mission Control's powerful predictive analytics identify potential issues and allow our care teams to proactively solve problems and improve care rather than react when issues arise. With the AI focusing on the important nuts and bolts of operational efficiency and care logistics, our caregivers can devote more time to providing the best care and delivering the best outcomes for our patients."
The Mission Control Center will complement CHI Franciscan's Virtual Hospital, which includes regional telemetry monitoring, virtual companion, virtual ICU, virtual hospitalist and other services. CHI Franciscan's virtual care teams complement on-site teams, for example, by providing continuous surveillance of cardiac rhythms for inpatients, which allows on-site staff maximum time at the bedside. The virtual ICU team, which includes physicians and nurses, monitors all CHI Franciscan ICU patients, resulting in shorter ICU stays and better outcomes.
CHI Franciscan Mission Control will be organized with a systemwide Mission Control Center, and smaller centers located at St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, St. Francis Hospital in Federal Way, and Harrison Medical Center in Silverdale.
CHI Franciscan Health is a Catholic nonprofit health system based in Tacoma, Wash., with $2.45 billion in total revenue and a team of more than 12,000 physicians, providers, nurses, and staff that provide expert, compassionate medical care at 11 acute care hospitals and over 200 primary and specialty care clinics throughout the greater Puget Sound.
For more information: www.gehealthcare.com
March 06, 2026 
