GE is is investing heavily to lay down the foundations for Industrial Internet, its vision for a global network of “smart” machines that will provide a constant stream of real-time sensory data for minute-by-minute visibility into operations. But there’s more to analytics than just collecting and storing information, which is why the engineering giant chucked a massive $105 million at EMC and VMware spinoff Pivotal last year as part of a broad technology alliance to deliver joint products based on Hadoop and in-memory processing technology.

Now, GE is rounding out its portfolio with the acquisition of API Healthcare, a 32-year-old firm that develops software tailored for the specific needs of hospitals. The Wisconsin-based company’s Healthcare Business Analytics Solution enables users to optimizing staff allocations according to the tasks at hand and keep overtime – one of largest expenses associated with patient care – at a minimum. The platform pulls in time and attendance data to identify productivity bottlenecks and make it easier for higher ups to evaluate staff performance based on actual work completed.

“Labor costs represent over 50 percent of hospital operating budgets,” noted Michael Swinford, the president and chief exec of GE’s Healthcare Services business. “With this acquisition, GE Healthcare will be able to address a significant portion of hospital operations costs – assets, patients and labor – with a mix of software, real-time data, powerful analytics and professional services.”

Besides analytics, API Healthcare also provides payroll, HR, patient classification and workforce scheduling solutions that it claims are used by more than 1,600 organizations throughout the US. The company’s lineup will be packaged into GE’s Hospital Operations Management (HOM) portfolio after the deal closes later this quarter.

Image source GE