By John Dineen

RSNA - the annual conference of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) - is taking place this week and there’s lots happening on the show floor: product news, discussions with leading physicians and radiologists around healthcare challenges and new technologies addressing those.

Watch this video and discover on the show floor the history of GE Healthcare technology - It is impressive how it has been evolving in the years. And I am really excited to see how it will continue impact patient care, comfort and productivity in the years to come.

By John Dineen

Last night at the London Business School’s Global Healthcare Conference held at the Royal College of Physicians I had what I called ‘my Steve Jobs moment’ when I showed the audience a Vscan – GE Healthcare’s pocket size ultrasound device.

Watch this video – this is a great example of how GE Healthcare is building products around access and bringing technology to more people around the globe.

Phase one of GE’s $100 million healthymagination Challenge has officially closed (as of November 20th).  This open innovation call-to-action was launched on September 15th as part of GE’s larger commitment to cancer, starting with breast cancer. During phase one, over 4,000 people engaged on the Challenge portal. They collectively submitted over 500 ideas to advance breast cancer diagnostics and left 170 comments.  Ideas were submitted from 40 countries with more than half generated outside of the US.  A word of thanks to all of the innovators who submitted ideas, added their support or expressed comments.

We launched this open innovation Challenge because we believe that the greatest cancer breakthroughs will come through partnership and collaboration.  I’m pleased to share that the quality of ideas submitted during phase one was exceptional.  By identifying and funding the very best ideas, as determined by our judges and venture capital partners, we hope that together, we will bring game-changing technologies to patients faster. 

To give you a flavor for the submitted ideas, here are two highlights:

Development of magnetic nanocarriers (received the most support): This idea suggests binding chemotherapy drugs to magnetic nanoparticles to enable more effective drug delivery and reduce the toxicity of existing chemotherapy methods.  

Quantum Dot Breast Cancer Screening Bra (received the most comments): This is an idea for a breast cancer screening device that is similar to a typical sports bra with a special lining that changes colors to detect potential malignant cells based on temperature.   

We are currently reviewing all submitted ideas and plan to announce winners in the first quarter of 2012 along with the next phase of the Challenge.  Again, thank you to everyone who has engaged in the Challenge community.  We look forward to continuing this dialogue in 2012. 

Mike Barber, VP healthymagination

By Mike Barber

I’ve been thinking a lot about breaking down barriers to health care access. In that spirit, I wanted to share two programs that we launched in the last week.

 Increasing access to breast cancer screening for women in Wyoming

In Wyoming, the average distance to a breast cancer screening facility is 70 miles and 33 percent of women never get screened. As part of our commitment to accelerate cancer innovation and expand global access to care, we launched a program last weekend called “WY Women First.”  Through the use of mobile screening technology and social networking, GE and its partners will provide access to screenings for 25,000 additional women in Wyoming during the coming year.  Our goal is to create a new model for rural health care access that can be replicated elsewhere.

Increasing access to diabetes care in Miami, Florida

The number of people living with diabetes in Miami exceeds the national average. To address this challenge, the GE Foundation announced last week a $3 million grant to Health Choice Network of Florida (HCNFL). The grant will establish a Care Management Medical Home Center for 10,000 Miami Dade patients suffering from chronic diabetes and its costly and debilitating side effects. This is our largest Developing Health donation to-date and marks the two-year anniversary of this program.  The Miami Herald talks about the program here.

By Mike Barber

I had the opportunity to participate in the 2011 Healthline HealthWeb Leadership Forum last week in New York City. The Forum addressed patient-provider communications challenges and how to improve outcomes through digital innovation. The event featured healthcare influencers and was attended by two hundred leaders in healthcare, spanning both the public and private sectors, including pharma, providers, insurers, government, publishers and technology innovators. 

During our panel discussion, we spent time talking about the patient-doctor conversation and how best to provide decision support through technology. The discussion centered around the idea that positive patient outcomes are a shared responsibility between the patient and doctor, and technology is essential to these outcomes.

As patients become better armed with information through technology, we will see the patient/doctor relationship evolve into something more meaningful and efficient. For example, over the past few years, GE has collaborated with HealthLine and MedHelp on projects that provide health information as well as steps patients should take to better manage their health. MedHelp has created mobile apps that encourage good choices around sleep, nutrition and fitness and HealthLine has created BodyMaps — an interactive tool that can guide people through what is going on inside the body during different conditions.

As the healthcare industry confronts the digital age, we have to continue to find IT solutions that further enhance the doctor/patient relationship and overall health for more people.

By John Dineen

And we are supporting it with ‘GE Global Pink Ribbon’ events in 25 countries over the next four weeks. GE employees from the US, Brazil, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Turkey, UAE, India, China and Japan will come together to form ‘human ribbons’, helping to raise awareness for the issues surrounding breast cancer.

So today I wore the pink T-shirt too and formed the human ribbon with my colleagues at The Grove Center, one of our UK plants where we spend our time and efforts making pharmaceutical diagnostics – which are used by physicians in the early detection, diagnosis and management of the disease.

Another great initiative we are supporting to further raise awareness of breast cancer is the Breast Cancer Mosaic website where we honour people’s unique and personal stories of the disease. Visitors to the interactive website are encouraged not only to browse the stories — many of them truly touching — but to share their own message with the world. So this is your call if you wish to join us in supporting BCAM.

I believe that campaigns such as this initiative are tremendously important — they remind us that more people are being diagnosed with breast cancer than ever before. We are sending a message around awareness and earlier detection that says, ‘this issue is important and more can be done.’ We must continue to find better ways to address this disease and help patients, so aligned with these initiatives, we are also committed to dedicating an even greater share of our R&D budget to continue developing new oncology solutions.

By Mike Barber

Building on our healthymagination commitment to breast cancer, GE is inviting women to share their experiences through a four-week mammography design installation in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood.  Patients, designers, students and thought leaders will join in the dialogue through a series of moderated discussions and workshops throughout the month of October. 

The project aims to “re-think” the current approach to breast screening and address many of the reasons why women avoid it. We will also review patient experience across the broader breast cancer care continuum. At the end of October, GE will create an optimized patient journey, which we hope to pilot in collaboration with a hospital partner.

The design installation brings together collaborators from the medical, design, non-profit and corporate worlds to explore new and inventive approaches to mammography and breast cancer care.   

The open studio, located at 382 West Broadway in NYC, will be open to the public the first three Saturdays in October from 12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. Please join us.

By Mike Barber

Check out my guest post on the Startup America Partnership blog, “A Call to Action: Innovative Ideas Needed to Save Lives.”

By Mike Barber

Over the past few weeks, I’ve attended several events focused on new developments in the health care space. I thought I would take a moment to share some of the highlights.

Last week, alongside the UN Summit meetings, the World Economic Forum and PAHO/WHO hosted an event featuring a panel focused on ending non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in the Americas. Global interest in the prevention and management of NCDs has catalyzed governments from around the world who are committed to improving the health of their citizens. The threat of NCDs has led to the international community’s focus on charting a course to comprehensively shape successful responses to this health challenge. This particular panel discussed the achievements and development of NCD programs in the Americas specifically, and offered an opportunity to begin looking at new ways forward. For me, it was a great opportunity to hear about the priorities and projects of specific countries, as well as learn about their successes. One of the interesting achievements highlighted was a response to the overconsumption of salt and its impact on hypertension.  In Latin America and the US, salt reduction has been key in improving nutrition. Through dietary salt reduction, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and the US are leading the region with their innovative salt reduction initiatives – including reducing salt in frequently purchased items like bread.

Another critical focus all across the Americas has been an effort to reduce the overall use of tobacco, a major cause of pre-mature death worldwide. There have been important commitments by some 29 countries in the Americas working to decrease demand. For example, Mexico and Panama increased taxes on tobacco products while other countries were successful in implementing non-smoking policies. Finally, since so much of this panel focused on lifestyle and wellness changes, fascinating stories were shared about a Caribbean Wellness Day and special biking programs in Colombia.

One of the unique themes I heard out of the UN Summit meetings is a greater interest in private sector involvement - how the private sector can continue to contribute to meeting development goals. Greater private sector involvement can help influence change and innovation in global health in truly impactful ways. And these discussions reaffirmed that for me. 

This was reiterated at the Business Call to Action Breakfast that I attended. Business Call to Action challenges companies to develop inclusive business models that offer the potential for both commercial success and development impact. At GE, one of the ways we feel that we can encourage those same goals is through our ecomagination and healthymagination commitments. In order to make significant changes in the world, we need to bring the scale of companies like GE to drive innovation globally.

On a slightly separate topic, following our recent announcement of healthymagination’s focus on cancer innovation, this week, GE hosted in Washington, DC a breakfast briefing with leaders from some of the most well-known cancer organizations.  We briefed the group on our cancer initiative, the global healthymagination challenge and other efforts in global access and innovation, and then heard their feedback and engaged in a conversation on the state of cancer care. The discussion provided valuable advice, potential partnership opportunities and insights on how we can better ensure that GE is hitting all the various components in providing a continuum of care to patients. It is always valuable for us to engage and involve third-party thought leaders as we go through this journey. Together we can be more effective in pushing the process forward within the healthymagination commitments to bring better health to more people.

By John Dineen

I really hope that many of you had a chance to join the launch of GE’s global campaign against cancer last week and that you are joining our conversation on fighting cancer and driving progress against it.

During the event in New York, I took part in a very interesting discussion with Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE, and Nancy Snyderman, Chief Medical Editor, NBC News. During our conversation, I was asked how we at GE Healthcare apply our technologies to environments that face different challenges and have different Healthcare systems.  It was definitely a vibrant discussion.

Every country has a different healthcare system and every country has different challenges.  But everybody’s trying to improve their healthcare system.  They’re all going after the same three variables, which are quality, cost and access. In countries like Saudi Arabia or China, the focus is on improving access to a large degree. But what we found is that those challenges aren’t unique to China or the Middle East. We can have the same rural challenges in Wyoming, in the US, for example. We’re in the process of making our X ray technologies more affordable, more ubiquitous, more transportable so that they can work in these rural settings.  The technologies we’re developing to solve these problems in developing markets are going to help us finish the job in countries like the US.

Our efforts help us to understand the workflows and to insert the right technology at the right place at the right time.  It’s not just about having one big CT scanner that takes care of every problem.  You need the right clinical capabilities and economics for screening, for diagnosing, for staging and for monitoring.

Different tools for different jobs.