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Kieran Murphy, President and CEO at GE Healthcare
July 14, 2021
When COVID-19 hit, healthcare companies needed to act fast to supply clinicians on the front lines with critical equipment to diagnose and treat patients.
Our first priority was keeping our employees safe and healthy — from our field engineers installing and servicing urgently needed equipment to our manufacturing workers as we increased production.
We dramatically ramped up and localised manufacturing, from teaming up with Ford to produce 50,000 emergency use ventilators to quadrupling our own ventilator production.
We also launched an unprecedented global logistics push to ensure we could get medical devices to where they were needed most.
We invested in immediate value-add innovations, like our CT-in-a-Box, to help clinicians in numerous countries assess disease progression and complications in COVID-19 patients.
We also saw a major switch to digitisation in healthcare systems — some hospitals told us they made more progress in a few months than they’d expected to in the next several years — highlighting the need to build an intelligence-based health system for the future.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 20 to 40 percent of health systems’ resources are wasted, which undermines service delivery. Global health providers understand that by reducing inefficiencies, welfare gains can be achieved. For public health systems, performance management and efficiency are important priorities, crucial to accelerate progress on health outcomes.
Innovations like our Mural virtual care solution and our Edison platform, the foundation of our AI and analytics capabilities, are helping healthcare providers maximise resources and improve patient care while minimising burnout. Tampa General Hospital in Florida deployed our Command Center technology to reduce the length of a patient’s stay by an entire day, adding 30 beds of additional capacity and eliminating $40 million in cost — all critical benefits in fighting COVID-19 and in building a more sustainable health care system.
Sustainability is core to our mission of delivering precision health, as we work to ensure that patients around the globe can access quality treatment faster. It will require the integration of data sets that have been very fragmented up to now and a move to portable and virtual care, like our virtual ICU or our new Vscan Air pocket-sized ultrasound.
And it’s why our teams around the globe and in some of the world’s toughest markets work tirelessly to support healthcare providers and create a healthier world with more precise and efficient care.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
