Committed to Smart Investments with Strong Clinical and Economic Outcomes

At GE Healthcare, we’re at work for a healthier world and through healthymagination we are focused on changing the delivery and economics of healthcare.

There are storm clouds on the healthcare horizon. On the demand side, populations are getting older and chronic diseases are exploding. On the supply side, governments and companies are finding it difficult to pay for current healthcare needs. At GE we think it makes good business sense to focus on this huge social problem. We know that the only way to solve this growing imbalance is with game-changing technologies.

Throughout the world, governments share a vexing challenge: how to deliver quality, cost-effective healthcare to more people. By 2030, the number of people over 65 will increase 140 percent in the developing world and more than 50 percent in developed markets. Chronic diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity, are equal-opportunity diseases that are very expensive to treat—by 2020, chronic disease will cause 75 percent of deaths worldwide. In China alone, loss of income related to chronic disease will increase eightfold by 2015, to $132 billion.

We do not think healthcare technologies have up until now answered the call to action. In the past, the approach to innovation in the industry has been to take technology to the next level and accept higher costs. GE wants to introduce technologies that can lower costs and improve access and quality at the same time. Simply put, healthymagination is our commitment to develop technologies that bend the cost curve with better clinical and economic value propositions.

In our view, this is a sound business strategy for our investors. In today’s world, investing in healthcare technologies that do not have clear value propositions – better clinical and economic outcomes – is a bad investment decision. We have become much more rigorous in assessing the impact of our investments, using the healthymagination screen. Healthymagination is the lens we use to review new technologies and services to ensure we’re delivering innovation that’s clinically and economically relevant. This discipline will have a positive impact on the ROI of our business by creating line of sight between customer and market needs and product development.

Healthymagination will ensure that GE delivers the technologies the new healthcare economy demands. Healthymagination has us focused on several important areas that will help change healthcare. As diagnostics and therapies shift to the molecular level, GE Healthcare delivers molecular diagnostics to detect disease and understand more about each individual patient, and life sciences capabilities to enable the next generation of bio-therapies. As governments put pressure on healthcare systems to be more productive, GE delivers expertise in technologies and solutions to help hospitals run better.

Healthymagination products, such as the Brivo CT in China and the Vivid P3 cardiac ultrasound in India, deliver in-country, for-country innovation bridging affordability and access gaps in developing markets. And, recognizing the role digitization plays in transforming healthcare, healthymagination frames our investment in the broadest health IT portfolio in the industry. We have built a portfolio that aligns very well with the new realities of healthcare.

Healthcare is one of the world’s biggest challenges. Healthymagination is a sound business strategy to shape the future of healthcare.