GE’s healthcare technologies have been in the spotlight in recent days, with one of the most noticeable being a tip of the hat from the tech gurus at Fast Company magazine. Each year they kick the tires on a slew of some of the biggest household names — from Apple to Nike to the folks at Facebook — to arrive at their “Most Innovative Companies” rankings. This year in the Healthcare category, GE grabbed the No. 1 spot. As Mike Barber, who heads GE’s healthymagination initiative, told the magazine: “We believe that what is good for the public at large and what is good for the world is also good business.” Fast Company says it picked GE for the top healthcare spot precisely because “six GE breakthroughs from the past year deliver on that promise.”
The new technologies include the smart-phone-sized Vscan ultrasound, which is pictured below, as “it lets primary-care doctors make diagnoses that once required a specialist,” the editors note. The Fast Company ranking comes just days after the new technology became commercially available in the U.S., Europe, India and Canada having received 510(k) clearance in the U.S. by the Food and Drug Administration, the CE Mark by the European Union, as well as the Medical Device License from Health Canada.
Making the Olympic cut: Vscan is seen here in action last week in GE’s Mobile Medical Unit – which is currently helping athletes at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. “Vscan may help change frontline healthcare practice – improving patient management during the physical exam by providing immediate, non-invasive, visual information inside the body,” said Dr. Ross Brown, manager of the Whistler Polyclinic, pictured above
Others technologies cited by Fast Company include the Mac 400 mobile ECG machine, designed for emerging markets, and the Mac 800 mobile ECG, which is sold in the U.S. As Mike told the magazine: “An ECG used to mean going to a hospital, and for large parts of India, China, and Africa, that doesn’t work.”
GE’s Centricity Electronic Medical Record system — and a digital database of treatment options tied to EMRs (which isn’t commercially available yet) that has been created with Intermountain Healthcare, the Mayo Clinic, and other institutions — also drew the attention of the editors. And Fast Company singled out the alliance between GE and Intel to develop and market home healthcare technologies — which, as we reported yesterday, is gaining further momentum now that Mayo Clinic has just launched a year-long study using some of the alliance’s technology.
When it comes to cancer research, the magazine underscored that the $250 million research investment by GE and Eli Lilly has “yielded a significant development: the ability to ‘simultaneously map more than 25 proteins in tumors at the subcellular level.’ That could aid custom treatment decisions for all forms of cancer,” the magazine notes.
* Read the full Fast Company list
* Read GE’s Vscan Olympics announcement
* Read about Vscan’s commercial launch
* Watch a video about GE’s Vscan
* Watch our video interview with one of Eli Lilly’s researchers
* Watch a video about our Mobile Medical Unit at the Olympics
