In a press release concerning its recent (March, 2002) purchase of iPath Software, the General Electric Company said that hospitals only utilize about 57 percent of an OR's capacity. That figure can be boosted to around 80 percent without adding staff, increasing hours or cutting back on delivery. This software that accomplishes this is called "peri-operative" software and is considered to be a sold niche market worth some $250 million to General Electric over the next several years. "GE plans to integrate iPath with its Centricity[TM] Enterprise clinical information system, to create the basis for a totally digital operating room environment" ("Consolidations," 2002,4).
iPath software enables OR managers and perioperative service directors to track how long each patient is scheduled to be in surgery based on the type of procedure, who the surgeon will be, and the types of resources needed to conduct the surgery. In other words, it is primarily a management software application with extensive intranet support and enhanced application operations, such as multiple user capability, and modified database retrievals with inter and intra cell password protection.
iPath appears to be a third-level ASIC-based security application designed to integrate multiple complex requests with firewall and VPN security that also provides third and fourth level rate enforcement tests, very high traffic prioritization numbers, high scalability for increasing numbers of users, and good burst handling and traffic classification.
The iPath web site suggests that iPath when configured with Ormis DB Management encompasses a family of integrated security products that is also completely scalable for enterprise-wide network needs, and also handle legacy WAN/LAN topologies of Ethernet, Fast Ethernet and gigabit networks, for Internet, extranet, intranet and departmental applications. The software is
...