Author: GEreporter

Yesterday, GE Global Research, which is the hub of technology development for all of GE’s businesses, announced that in the race to have the most efficient, low-cost solar technology on the market, GE is now focusing its extensive R&D efforts on what’s known as “thin film” technology. As we described in our recent audio slideshow with Danielle Merfeld, GE’s solar R&D leader, the vision for thin film solar panels is that they will be lightweight, inexpensive and can one day be wrapped around objects, conform to a roof, or even hung like sails. GE is stepping up the pace of its thin film work in conjunction with PrimeStar Solar Inc., which is an Arvada, Colorado-based startup firm in which GE is a majority investor. As you can see in the audio slideshow below, unlocking the secrets of the complex technology with PrimeStar is a job that is uniting GE’s network of four Global Research Centers — and drawing on the unique expertise found in each.

GE has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D in the last decade, resulting in dramatic expansions at research headquarters in Niskayuna, New York and our center in Bangalore, India; the creation of global research centers in Munich and Shanghai; and new technology centers planned for Detroit, Michigan and Masdar City in the Middle East. Leveraging that global scale can be seen firsthand in the solar project.

The Munich team is using solar system test facilities to study performance. In China, where most of the cadmium telluride — the necessary raw material for thin film — originates, researchers are immersed in materials and the impact they have on device performance. In India, the team is focused on modeling. Unlike the exclusively experimental approach favored by many in this field, the GE team believes that dramatic improvements will result from a deeper understanding of the materials and the basic physics of the device. And in Niskayuna, N.Y., scientists are working on all facets of development, including material growth and development of the device itself. Their technical expertise cuts across fields such as surface chemistry, laser processing and plasma physics.

Said Danielle of the unified effort, “GE researchers are innovating across our four global research centers — literally around the clock — to deliver a breakthrough product to market.”

* Read the announcement
* Hear about the thin film work straight from our scientists on their blog
* Watch “The GE Genius Series: Catching rays with ‘solar sails’” on GE Reports
* Read coverage on CNET, GreenTechMedia, and PV-tech
* Read more Global Research stories on GE Reports
* Learn more about PrimeStar on their website
* Read “Cheers! To a decade of innovation at GE’s labs” on GE Reports

GE’s sponsorship of the Ronald Reagan Centennial Celebration kicked-off yesterday, with a number of tributes to the 40^th President — from friends and former colleagues to some of the 250,000 GE employees he visited during his eight years as a GE goodwill ambassador. Among those highlighting the rapport forged with GE staffers over the years — and the role GE played in Reagan’s life — was author Thomas W. Evans, who writes on GE’s Reagan Centennial website: “Hugh Sidey of Time/Life, who covered every president from Eisenhower through George W. Bush, commented that he thought Reagan’s speeches in England and Russia were the finest ever given abroad by an American leader. When he asked a White House speechwriter who had written these offerings, he was told: ‘Reagan. They were actually pretty much the speeches he had given when he worked for General Electric.’”

In the lab: Ronald Reagan is seen here in 1954 at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, New York — which is the headquarters of GE’s technology development arm.

Evans recalled that “when Reagan gave his nationally-televised speech in support of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in October of 1964, David Broder, the dean of the Washington press corps, described it as ‘the most successful political debut since William Jennings Bryan’s Cross of Gold speech in 1896.’ The speaker told the press that the address had been developed during his GE years, when, in addition to his television duties, he spent a quarter of his time traveling the country to speak with the company’s employees and their neighbors…. He had a vision which developed from study and talks with GE workers and executives all over the country.”

Paging Mr. Reagan: At the Reagan Centennial event in Simi Valley, Calif. last night, GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt and former first lady Nancy Reagan flipped through a photo album from her husband’s days on GE Theater, which he hosted from 1954 to 1962. Among those in attendance were Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Secretary of State George Schultz, T. Boone Pickens, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

Among the employees Reagan met during his years as host of TV’s General Electric Theater and as our goodwill ambassador was Ralph Garbutt. In the audio slideshow below, he recalls a chance meeting with Reagan at an early-morning sales meeting in the middle of blinding New England blizzard:

And Rich Overholtzer recalls Reagan dropping into his GE cubicle one afternoon — just to talk sports — in the audio slideshow below.

As Jeff Immelt said about Reagan in his prepared remarks for last night’s talk at the Reagan Presidential Library: “He traveled the breadth of the country, riding trains to visit GE plants, speaking hundreds of times to tens of thousands of workers. He started at dawn and would get to his hotel after midnight. And then he’d do it all over again the next day…. Mr. Reagan walked every assembly line at GE. Every single one… He heard from them their stories of how bright and hard working people can create success. Those lessons, too, became articles of faith for the man who didn’t believe in walls, economic or political.”

* A rebroadcast of Jeff’s speech will be available on the Reagan Library website later today
* Read “The Reagan centennial: A legacy of progress” on GE Reports
* Read GE’s Centennial announcement
* Read “U.S. Must Revive Exports, Optimism, GE’s Immelt Says” from Bloomberg
* Read coverage by Matt Lewis: “GE and Ronald Reagan: The Mutual Gift That Keeps on Giving”
* Listen to a podcast of Matt Lewis’ interview with Jeff Immelt
* Listen to a podcast with GE’s Gary Sheffer and the Reagan Foundation’s John Heubusch
* Read event coverage of Jeff’s speech at the Reagan Library from the Ventura County Star
* Read “Reagan ‘GE Theater’ tapes restored, go to library” from The Associated Press
* See more of Reagan’s General Electric Theater spots by clicking the videos in this slideshow
* Read Reagan essays on our website by Thomas W. Evans, Peggy Noonan, Andrea Mitchell, Tom Brokaw, and Rudy Giuliani

Long before he ran for office, Ronald Reagan served as the host of the weekly TV series, General Electric Theater — and as a GE goodwill ambassador from 1954 to 1962. He also traveled to 139 GE plants — inspiring employees with his optimism, entrepreneurial spirit and a belief in innovation. Building on that shared history, GE today announced that it will partner with The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation to become the Presenting Sponsor of the historic Ronald Reagan Centennial Celebration — which is a two-year-long commemoration of President Reagan’s 100th birthday on February 6, 2011. This morning, GE announced details of its $15 million sponsorship — including a fund that will provide 200 four-year college scholarships over the next decade. Later today at the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, GE’s Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt will give a talk – which can be viewed live at 6 p.m. Pacific time on the Library’s website — with former First Lady Nancy Reagan among those in attendance.

Way back when…. Click on the images to start a slide show of photographs from Ronald Reagan’s GE days. Select “Show Info” in the upper right menu when it launches in order to read the captions.

During each General Electric Theater episode, Reagan highlighted the work of GE’s employees by promoting the company’s technologies — punctuating each spot with GE’s tag line at the time: “Progress is Our Most Important Product.” As President Reagan wrote in his memoirs: “Looking back now, I realize it wasn’t a bad apprenticeship for someone who’d someday enter public life…. The GE tours became almost a graduate course in political science.”

Innovation matters: The TV spot below, which will be running during the Centennial, features clips from Reagan’s GE days. More photos, videos, archival footage, and remembrances can be found on the website, www.ge.com/reagan

GE’s sponsorship includes funds to support the completely transformed Museum at the Reagan Library, which will include a new General Electric Theater. GE is also donating 208 restored episodes of General Electric Theater in which Reagan hosted or appeared from 1954-1962. Many of the episodes which were thought to be lost — and some that were damaged — were recently uncovered in GE/NBC Universal’s archives and restored to broadcast quality for purposes of the renovated Reagan Museum.

Home sweet home: Take a tour of the Reagan’s home and all of its products that help them “live better electrically,” as the old slogan goes, in the General Electric Theater clip below.

Back to the future: A letter from a young General Electric Theater viewer is the launching point for the “Progress Report” below from Reagan’s years at GE.

As Jeff wrote in his prepared remarks for tonight’s speech: “1954 to 1962 were special years at GE. According to his memoirs, President Reagan considered his time at GE the second most-important eight-year job he ever had. GE is honored by the association. But I suspect we learned from him more than he learned from us. And the most important thing President Reagan taught all Americans is in this remarkable country, you can succeed as many times as you have the courage and initiative and vision to try.”

* Read today’s announcement
* Learn more about the centennial at www.reagancentennial.com
* See more videos and photos on wwww.ge.com/Reagan
* Read coverage by Matt Lewis “GE and Ronald Reagan: The Mutual Gift That Keeps on Giving”
* See more of Reagan’s General Electric Theater spots by clicking the videos in this slideshow

Read Reagan essays on our website by:
* Thomas W. Evans, author of The Education of Ronald Reagan: The General Electric Years and the Untold Story of his Conversion to Conservatism
* Peggy Noonan, who was a special assistant to President Reagan and is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal
* Andrea Mitchell, NBC News Correspondent

Check back tomorrow for more videos and remembrances from Reagan’s GE years.

Each year creative minds from music, film, and emerging technologies converge in Austin, Texas for a week of panels and performances at the South by Southwest conference, known as SXSW. Ben Fry — who’s been helping GE make its mountains of healthcare data more accessible through a series of data visualizations — is on the Interactive Infographics panel today at 3:30 p.m. at SXSW. We asked him to write a guest post, which appears below and is co-authored by his GE counterpart, Camille Kubie, on why the interactive presentation of data is showing great promise as a new form of media.

Ben Fry

We’ll never have less data. So, how do we digest it and use it to make complex issues easier to understand? A recent and much cited study out of the University of California, San Diego found that the amount of data consumed by U.S. individuals has grown by 5.4% per year since 1980. In 2008 the average American consumed over a hundred thousand words and billions of bytes of information during an average day — not including information consumed at work.

This data deluge presents a unique set of challenges for consumers, designers, and businesses alike. More data on its own does not necessarily provide clarity. Usually, more data simply confuses the conversation, whether exploring health care costs or evaluating alternative energy solutions.

How can critical questions be tackled intelligently when the information gets in the way? While faster computers and bigger hard disks have made us really good at measuring and recording things, we have not kept up with how to present the resulting information. Consumers face the twin problems of determining the credibility of data sets and accessing those data sets in forms that are easily absorbed. In other words, what should we ignore and how can we “see” relevant data more clearly?

The art of information: Click on the images below to see some of our recent data visualization projects. Ben helped us with the three in the top row.

These challenges are rapidly moving data visualization out of research laboratories and into the public arena. Businesses and designers are teaming up around data — mining the information and shaping it into something we can more easily process, understand and use. In this collaboration, businesses play a critical role. To contribute meaningfully, corporations have to get comfortable with data transparency. Business has the unique opportunity to share valuable and credible data sets that they already collect as part of their everyday operations. By providing the data and resources to shape that information in a more accessible way, business can help advance the public conversation on society’s toughest challenges.

Businesses can also create value for their partners and customers by actively working to simplify complexity. Practitioners of data visualization are the architects in this collaboration. They contribute their knowledge of statistics, data mining, graphic design and information visualization as they consider how best to organize and insightfully present millions of data points, often from data that’s continually changing.

By its very nature, data visualization can be exceptionally flexible with an ability to be both aesthetically driven as well as utilitarian. Great visualizations are business tools, communication platforms, and works of art. The designs are as varied as the solutions but the good ones share one thing in common: they present complex information clearly and intelligently.

Commander data: Click on the image above to watch our November interview with Ben.

To that end, effective data visualizations don’t start with data — they start with questions. What are you trying to see? The process of getting from data to understanding is rarely straightforward and frequently involves a balancing of information and insight.

Most importantly for business collaborations, great data visualizations are about the audience. The primary criteria for evaluating the success of a visualization is whether it’s appropriate for the people that you’re trying to reach. Unless what you produce is accessible to your audience it fails to communicate.

The business/designer collaboration with data is only beginning. Our understanding and application of this evolving field of visualization will increase — but good teams are committed to its basic promises: the ability to see more clearly, to communicate more effectively and to engage more thoroughly with the information we have.

Ben Fry is the founder and proprietor of a data visualization firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Camille Kubie manages Brand and Design at GE and runs the company’s data visualization initiative. They have collaborated on several projects around healthymagination and Ecomagination.

* Watch a Columbia University video interview with Ben
* Watch CNN’s data visualization slide show

With nearly 16 percent of the U.S. population living without health insurance — or 45 million people — the lack of access to quality care is a problem that continues to grow. It’s one of the reasons why GE, as part of its healthymagination initiative, committed to a 3-year, $25 million program last October to help increase access to primary care in 10 underserved locations across U.S. Today Milwaukee, Wisconsin became the second city in the U.S., following New York, to receive a grant from the GE Foundation Developing Health program to improve access to primary care. The $1 million will be split between four Milwaukee community health centers — all of which offer health services to patients that are not able to pay.

Measuring Milwaukee: Alicia Cheng of MGMT Design helped us visualize the state of health in Milwaukee County compared to averages in Wisconsin and the nation. Click on the image to enlarge it. This is GE’s 8th data visualization on health. You can view the other seven on the healthymagination website.

“All of us are honored to be recognized by GE for this funding and the supporting volunteers, which will allow us to increase access and improve our services for the more 30,000 patients and almost 115,000 visits we have annually,” said C.C. Henderson, president and CEO, Milwaukee Health Services, Inc, which runs two of the clinics receiving grants: Martin Luther King Heritage Health Center and Isaac Coggs Heritage Health Center. The other health centers are the Cesar Chavez Clinic and Parkway Clinic, which are part of the Sixteenth Street Community Health Center.

In addition to the grants, the GE employee volunteer programs will partner with each of the health centers to provide skill-based support and best practice sharing. The GE teams and clinic staffs will focus on addressing business–based process improvements to benefit patients and workflows.

All access pass: “So many people are struggling to maintain their health in our community,” said John Bartkowski, president and CEO, Sixteenth Street Community Health Center. “The number of people that we see without insurance or resources to pay for healthcare continues to grow on a daily basis.” Pictured from left at today’s press conference: GE’s Mike Barber; C.C. Henderson, President and CEO, Milwaukee Health Services, Inc; Gov. Jim Doyle of Wisconsin; John Bartkowski; GE’s Deborah Elam, VP and Chief Diversity Officer; and Dr. Tito Izard, Chief Medical Officer, Milwaukee Health Services, Inc.

Said Mike Barber, VP of GE healthymagination: “I’ve lived in Milwaukee all my life and understand well the area’s potential, and its challenges, particularly in the area of healthcare. By partnering with these clinics to increase access to primary care we can help more people get the care they need when they need it. This program and the volunteers supporting it are a living example of GE’s healthymagination strategy to help change the world’s approach to healthcare by touching more lives and improving quality of care.”

GE, the GE Foundation — which is the philanthropic organization of GE — and the GE Corporate Diversity Council modeled the new initiative on GE’s successful philanthropic program, “Developing Health Globally,” which directly impacts more than 4.8 million people worldwide by improving access to quality healthcare for some of the world’s most vulnerable populations.

* Read the announcement
* Learn more about the Developing Health initiative
* Learn more on the Developing Health Globally website
* Watch a video: “Developing Health: A clinic grows in Brooklyn” on GE Reports
* Read about our other data visualizations on GE Reports
* Read stories about GE’s other philanthropic efforts on GE Reports

Glittering Broadway marquees and flashing neon are the norm in New York City’s Times Square. But each year, three scientists get to join the dazzling display when their winning entries from GE Healthcare’s IN Cell Image Competition are broadcast on NBC’s giant high-definition TV screen. This year’s competition featured over 80 intricate shots generated by scientists from more than 10 countries using the IN Cell Analyzer system — which combines a microscope, camera and powerful software to take images of fluorescently stained cells and then analyze them. The goal is to better understand diseases and evaluate new drug compounds for treating them. As we described in our recent story about the competition’s kick-off, the images produced are so vivid and stunning that they could easily be taken for gallery works. In the first two videos below, this year’s winners are seen in New York last week — with their works of art flashing above — and some of GE’s customers describe how critical the technology is to their research.

Night at the museum: Click on the wall of images from the contest to start a slideshow. The images were shortlisted by a scientific panel and the winners were determined through a public vote. The three winning images were featured in Times Square from March 5-7.

Winner Keiko Suzuki, from Showa University, Japan, said of her work with bone cells: “The IN Cell Analyzer’s ability to take so many pictures in a short time allows us to save a lot of time.” For winner Dr. Miriam Ascagni, from DIBIT-San Raffaele Scientific Institute in Italy, the bone marrow-derived cells she is studying with the technology may help “generate replacements for muscle cells that are lost because of injury or disease,” she said. Added winner Corey Seehus, of Brain Cells, Inc., about his neuron research: “I love the work I am engaged in right now, and this competition was an awesome bonus.”

And since the images do have a certain hypnotic appeal, we thought we’d share this video montage of the submissions — created with just the right touch of mood music — by Ed Chadwick, an artist in Amersham, which is just north of London in the U.K.

* Learn more about the contest and download a screensaver
* Read “Where the wild things are: GE’s cell analyzer contest” on GE Reports
* Read “Take a magical mystery tour with GE’s cell analyzer” on GE Reports

The movies are filled with great trucking teams — from Burt Reynolds and Jerry Reed in “Smokey and the Bandit” to Kris Kristofferson and an army of drivers in “Convoy.” Now transport finance can add Navistar International and GE Capital to the list of road warriors. In a new alliance, Warrenville, Illinois-based Navistar — a global manufacturer of commercial trucks, buses, and diesel engines — has chosen GE Capital as the preferred retail financing partner for trucks and school buses for its U.S. dealers. Navistar will now be able to free up critical capital to invest in what they do best — making and selling trucks and buses. GE Capital, in turn, will do what it does best — provide financing in an industry it understands, leveraging nearly 40-years of experience in the transportation financing space. In the audio clips below — which we’ve attached to some of Navistar’s trucks in action — GE Capital’s Dan Henson and David Johanneson, President and CEO of Navistar Financial, explain the deal:

The new financing deal — which is part of GE Capital’s push to invest and grow core businesses — builds on the successful dealer financing relationship GE has had in place with Navistar in Canada since 1986. As Dan told Reuters: “This is core to what we do.” GE will essentially be focusing on the end users of the equipment while Navistar Financial Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Navistar, will continue to provide financing to its dealers.

As Dow Jones newswires explained in its story: “Navistar Financial’s traditional focus has been on small- and medium-size trucking companies that have limited credit options, even in a healthy economy.” The alliance, Dow Jones notes, “boosts the truck and engine-maker’s ability to extend credit to customers for truck purchases” – which also allows Navistar to better support its dealer network. It’s an important need, they explain, as “truck buyers have grown more reliant on vendor financing amid a prolonged slump across the freight industry and constrained bank lending.”

* Read Dow Jones’ coverage
* Read “GE to take on bulk of Navistar finance operations” from Reuters
* Read the announcement
* Learn more about Navistar
* Visit GE Capital’s website
* Learn more about GE Capital in these GE Reports stories

Our story yesterday turned the spotlight on GE’s R&D and the way in which sustained technology investments, even in an economic downturn, translate into new products with huge potential. As described in GE’s just-released online Annual Report, new product introductions are one side of the equation. The other is how technologies and solutions get deployed in the field by customers such as AEP, one of the largest investor-owned utilities. As Tom Jones, Research Program Manager for AEP, says in the video below about their smart grid project: “GE really understands the customer. We understand the utility system — what it takes to supply customers. The two come together to make a really good team.” Adds Ray Hayes, Advanced Testing Manager for AEP: “This is a great time for the American utility industry. There’s so much opportunity to look into new technologies. To be able to be part of the birth of the next generation of that grid, it’s very exciting.”

Smart grid solutions such as this are part of GE’s efforts to tackle “the stubborn problems of energy efficiency,” as GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt writes in this year’s Annual Report. “GE always takes a ‘systems approach’ to problem solving, applying innovative solutions to customer and societal needs,” he writes, and “technology is the key to a clean energy future. Last year, we made substantial investments to commercialize smart grid solutions, sodium and lithium battery technology, offshore wind, smart appliances and multi-fuel gas turbines.” Combined with investments in a “new generation of nuclear reactors and clean coal technology,” the innovations together will not only provide comprehensive solutions to customers — from giant utilities to individual homeowners — they’ll also “facilitate energy security and job creation,” he writes.

* Learn more about AEP gridSMART
* Read “Getting smarter about the smart grid” on GE Reports
* Watch GE Reports’ videos about our smart grid research labs
* Read “Introducing the zero energy home” on GE Reports
* Read “Hoo-rah! Marines fire up GE’s smart grid technology”
* Hear about the smart grid straight from our scientists on their blog
* Read about our smart grid work in NY and NJ
* Learn about GE’s smart grid efforts in Florida, Oklahoma and Houston
* Read about our research with the Dept. of Energy

Making GE an “industrial company first” and pushing our competitive advantage in technology — they’re key themes at GE in 2010 and ones that take center stage in a new letter to shareholders in this year’s Annual Report. “In 2010, we will spend about 5 percent of our industrial revenue on R&D,” writes GE’s Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt in the note. “We have filed 20,000 patents this decade. We have nearly 40,000 engineers and scientists around the world. We have developed more than 150 core technologies that create leadership across our company. We share technologies and innovation across multiple platforms to create technological scale. We benchmark each of these against our competition and lead in many.” One of the most recent examples of that technology push can be seen in the handheld Vscan ultrasound. As GE Healthcare’s Al Lojewski explains in the video below, which is part of GE’s online Annual Report: “We really hope that this is going to truly change the way that all physicians worldwide interact with their patients.”

As Jeff notes in the letter, “Time magazine called this era ‘The Decade From Hell,’ and ‘when you are going through hell,’ Winston Churchill advised, ‘keep going.’” But in the midst of “one of the worst global economic downturns in history,” the focus on technology R&D continues to be critical to industrial growth. “Infrastructure can fully leverage GE enterprise advantages,” Jeff writes. “Much of our technology is common to multiple businesses, so we can spread innovations across our portfolio.” Using GE’s investments in renewable energy, oil & gas, water treatment and life sciences over the last decade as examples, Jeff writes: “In 2000, these businesses were virtually zero; today they generate around $20 billion in revenue. We are currently launching new adjacencies in batteries, avionics and services.”

Idea factory: Click on the chart above to expand the view. GE engineers and scientists have filed over 20,000 patents in the 2000’s — that’s twice as many as in the previous decade.

Those technology investments can have dramatic results when new products eventually hit the market. For example, $1 billion invested in the advanced GEnx jet engine has resulted in $15 billion in orders. Likewise, $400 million invested in GE’s Evolution line of locomotives has translated into $8 billion in orders. Click here to see a chart on these investments and others.

In addition to technologies such as Vscan in the healthcare sector, GE is also focusing on “introducing more new products at more price points,” he notes, pointing to the idea of “reverse innovation.” Writes Jeff: “Essentially, this takes a low-cost, emerging market business model and translates it to the developed world. To this end, we have developed a full line of high-margin, low-cost healthcare devices, designed in China and India, and now marketed successfully in the developed world.”

At the same time that GE is rapidly evolving healthcare technologies, teams are also building “strong bonds with hundreds of community hospital systems like Ochsner, in New Orleans, and Virtua Health, in New Jersey,” Jeff writes. “Over the last decade, we’ve gone beyond supplying them diagnostic imaging equipment. We work just as hard on quality, leadership and productivity solutions. We’ve helped make Ochsner and Virtua two of the highest-quality and most cost-efficient health systems in the country.”

GE’s full online Annual Report will be available at www.ge.com/investors Tuesday morning — when we’ll also bring you a look at some of GE’s smart grid work that is highlighted in the report.

Learn more about GE’s latest technologies in these GE Reports stories:
* Healthymagination technologies that lower costs and increase quality and access
* Ecomagination technologies that are more energy efficient
* New projects underway in our labs at GE Global Research

As we recently reported, 10 of GE’s solar-powered water purification units were shipped to earthquake-stricken Haiti to help with the country’s desperate needs for clean water. Now, seven of the Sunspring units are up and running — with each able to provide safe water for up to 10,000 people per day. Our Sunspring partner, Innovative Water Technologies, was hard at work this week completing installations that bring the total of available clean water in the Port au Prince area to over 40,000 gallons per day. The video below was created and produced by Mark Tchelistcheff of openfilms.net and documents the installation at the SOS Children’s Village orphanage in Santo, Haiti.

In addition to the work at SOS, Innovative Water Technologies installed one of the units at STEP, which stands for Seminaire Theologique de l’Eglise de Dieu en Haiti. The photo below, taken from a cell phone, shows the line-up for water just minutes after the installation was completed. The Sunspring unit is operating on the other side of the wall.

The STEP Clinic in Croix des Bouquets serves the needs of a surrounding community of approximately 25,000 people and provided critical medical care to the community after the earthquake.

The team on the ground in Haiti says that so far, all of the untreated water samples they have tested have shown unsafe microbiological contamination — which means the necklace of SunSpring systems being installed can make a critical difference.

The unit at the SOS Children’s home is seen just after installation was completed.

As the team writes on their Haiti update blog: “IWT installed the first Sunspring water filtration system in Haiti in February of 2009. Little did they know they would be back a year later to facilitate the installation of more systems in and around Port au Prince. Hospitals and clinics, orphanages, central city areas, and youth sports centers are just a few of the organizations benefitting.”

The ecomagination technology effectively treats groundwater, surface-water, and recycled rainwater or cistern water. They are solar-powered, portable, and able to produce clean drinking water using the same membrane treatment technology used by large scale treatment plants.

With much of Haiti’s water supply contaminated following the quake, the need for filtration equipment to prevent dysentary and other diseases is extremely high.

As CBS news noted in its story about the Haiti shipments: “The units are quick to deploy and can be operational three hours after arrival. That means they can have an immediate impact — but they can also be of critical use long-term, as they operate for years.”

Of the $2.5 million that GE has targeted for earthquake relief in Haiti, $1 million will be used to aid in long-term recovery. In addition to the water units, GE sent critically needed medical technologies, such as ultrasound, anesthesia and x-ray, and mobile video units to help search and rescue teams.

* See the status of installations via Google Maps and Google Earth View
* Read updates on the IWT “Haiti Today” blog
* See more photos of IWT’s work in Haiti on their Picasa albums
* Read “Solar-powered water purification units ship to Haiti” on GE Reports
* See a CBS news video about the Sunspring units heading to Haiti
* Learn more about our partner, Innovative Water Technologies
* Learn more about the GE Foundation

Doctors from around the world have been turning their attention to the latest breakthroughs in healthcare IT this week at the annual meeting of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society in Atlanta, Georgia. Featuring one of the year’s biggest tech expos, the conference is a chance for the society’s more than 20,000 members to see how healthcare is rapidly transforming thanks to an array of new computerized technologies designed to put more information in doctors’ hands.

In touch: As we reported during the Olympics, another GE healthcare IT solution was in the spotlight recently. The Centricity imaging system, seen above, provides an “electronic trading post” for radiology images.

GE is at the event, where — as we described in our story on Monday — the healthcare team unveiled Qualibria — an innovative computerized system that provides doctors with real-time clinical data and faster access to current research — right at a patient’s side. It’s been developed using three decades of clinical information from the Intermountain Healthcare system of hospitals and through a partnership with the Mayo Clinic. In the video clip below, Dr. Brandon Savage, who is GE Healthcare IT’s Chief Medical Officer, gives an overview of why the HIMSS meeting is so important.

The critical role that healthcare IT needs to play is also the subject of a new book, Paper Kills 2.0, which is published by the Center for Health Transformation. Chapter 2 of the book focuses on Intermountain’s successful blueprint for care, and is co-written by Marc Probst, Intermountain’s Chief Information Officer; Dr. Brent James, Intermountain’s Chief Quality Officer; and Brandon.

As they note, “Simply keeping up with current medical knowledge is a Herculean task as the growth of medical knowledge is estimated to double every 18 months to two years.” It’s why Intermountain has been a pioneer in using computerized technologies to tackle the complex issue of medical best practices. “If physicians know what standard of care has proven most clinically effective at the onset of each patient encounter,” the authors write, “then physicians can more efficiently develop a treatment plan for each patient.”

But the healthcare IT journey for Intermountain didn’t begin with a focus on computers or IT. Rather, it was born from a passion for efficiency. As the authors note: “About 30 years ago, Intermountain adopted many of the philosophies of W. Edward Deming, the quality improvement pioneer who is credited with revolutionizing manufacturing, most notably through his work with the Japanese auto industry. The process began with a series of studies to measure variations in care delivery that were based on Deming’s quality improvement theory. Intermountain embraced the philosophy that by improving the outcomes of clinical processes, the cost of operations would drop.”

It’s this line of thinking that led to the collaboration with GE and Mayo Clinic on Qualibria, which Brandon explains in the video clip at left. And that focus on improving patient outcomes while simultaneously lowering cost — a theme of the HIMSS conference and core pillars of GE’s healthymagination strategy — is what’s driving GE’s eHealth Platform technologies. The next-generation version of the system was unveiled at HIMSS this week, and at its core is what known as the eHealth Information Exchange (HIE), which integrates clinical data from across disparate systems and manages the wide variety of clinical records, document types and terminologies that are pervasive in today’s healthcare system.

As Newt Gingrich, who is a founder of the Center for Health Transformation, and Tom Daschle — both of whom are members of GE’s healthymagination Advisory Board — write in the book’s forward: “Despite agreement on the broad goals of improving care and lowering costs, the past year has shown that finding common ground on health reform can seem impossible. While it is important for policymakers to stand their ground when they must, it is equally as important to have the courage to collaborate when they should. Modernizing our system with health information technology is one of those issues.”

Learn more about GE and Intermountain in these GE Reports stories:
* “A breakthrough decision support solution for docs”
* “Inside the revolution at Intermountain Healthcare”
* “Intermountain, Mayo & GE unveil clinical data system”

Read coverage about GE and HIMSS:
* smartplanet.com
* ZDNet Healthcare
* modernhealthcare.com

* Read this week’s announcement about GE’s eHealth Platform
* Read this week’s announcement about imaging solutions and EMRs
* Learn more about the healthymagination Advisory Board
* Learn more about the Center for Health Transformation
* Watch an interview with Newt Gingrich and Tom Daschle

In Greek mythology, “gorgons” such as Medusa were terrifying creatures who could turn you to stone with just a look. Sitting off the north coast of Western Australia, the Greater Gorgon gas fields certainly have the ability to leave energy experts frozen in their tracks, as the area is estimated to contain about 40 trillion cubic feet of gas – making it Australia’s largest-known gas resource. Back in October, we reported that Chevron awarded GE Oil & Gas a contract worth over $400 million to supply advanced liquefied natural gas (LNG) technology for the drilling project. Today, that deal has now grown to include even more equipment — including orders of new natural gas turbines — bringing the total of Chevron’s deal with GE to over $1.1 billion.

Fill ‘er up! Located off of Barrow Island, the Gorgon natural gas fields contain enough gas to power a city the size of Dublin or Naples for 800 years. Above is an artist’s rendition of the liquefied natural gas being loaded onto ships. Source: Chevron.

The Gorgon project will supply cleaner burning natural gas for the growing Asia-Pacific and Australian markets — and features the world’s largest project to capture and store carbon dioxide. Much of the GE Oil & Gas technology is being used so that the gas can be liquefied, making it easy to transport via ship or pipeline. For example, GE’s “Refrigerant Compression Trains,” are a series of compressors driven by gas that will chill the natural gas to a liquid state of minus 160-degrees Celsius.

Under the sea: GE Oil & Gas’ Drilling and Production business will supply the subsea production system that will be installed between 60km and 140 km offshore of Barrow Island, in water that is 200 to 1,350 meters deep. Source: Chevron.

In LNG production, removing the CO2 is necessary as it can freeze in the LNG process, potentially damaging equipment. The current standard practice by all operating LNG facilities worldwide is to vent this CO2 into the atmosphere as a concentrated stream. However, Gorgon will be the first LNG Project to reinject and store the C02 rather than vent it — and GE compressor technology will also be at the heart of this process. The amount of C02 emissions that will be avoided through this process is the equivalent of taking more than 630,000 passenger cars off US roads every year. The project will ultimately inject up to four times more carbon dioxide than any other worldwide.

Heavy lifting: GE’s subsea equipment, which is used to produce gas from the offshore fields, will ultimately total approximately 10,000 tons in weight — making it arguably one of the largest ever fabrication scopes in a subsea development project to date. Here, a helicopter at the site is seen airlifting supplies. Source: Chevron.

Equipment such as the advanced liquefaction compressors and Frame 9 gas turbines that will be used to meet the needs of Barrow Island’s gas treatment and liquefaction facilities will be made in GE’s factories in France and Italy. Other equipment, such as the Frame 7 mechanical drive gas turbines required for Gorgon’s production of 15 million tons per year of liquefied natural gas will be made at GE’s plant in Greenville, South Carolina. The subsea equipment supply will be managed from GE Oil & Gas offices in Perth Australia. Other GE facilities around the world — in the UK, Norway and Singapore – will also be delivering other components.

Plenty to go around: The Gorgon Project is a joint venture of the Australian subsidiaries of Chevron (approximately 47 percent), ExxonMobil (25 percent) and Shell (25 percent), Osaka Gas (1.25 percent), Tokyo Gas (one percent) and Chubu Electric (0.417 percent). Source: Chevron.

Claudi Santiago, President and CEO of GE Oil & Gas said: “I am delighted that GE Oil & Gas has again been selected by Chevron, this time to meet Gorgon’s substantial subsea equipment and power generation requirements with high performance, efficiency and reliability. These further contract wins strengthen our partnership role in the project, confirming our technology leadership position which is built on a proven, diverse and integrated solutions portfolio.”

Deep dive: In simple terms, the technology will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the injection and storage of carbon dioxide underground. The CO2 injection location is on the central eastern coast of Barrow Island near the gas processing plant. This site was selected to maximize the migration distance from major geological faults and limit ground disturbance.

* Read today’s announcement
* Read “GE Wins $1.1 Billion Supply Contracts From Gorgon” from Bloomberg
* Read more GE Oil & Gas stories on GE Reports
* Learn more about the Gorgon field at www.chevronaustralia.com
* Learn more about GE Oil & Gas
* Visit the Gorgon Project website
* Read previous GE Oil & Gas news on Gorgon
* Learn more about GE Oil & Gas LNG capabilities
* Read a GE Oil & Gas Factsheet

Healthcare IT is in the spotlight this week in Atlanta, Georgia as one of the year’s biggest tech expos gets underway. As part of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s annual meeting, GE is showcasing a range of projects, including today’s announcement about Qualibria, an innovative computerized system that provides doctors with real-time clinical data and faster access to current research — right at a patient’s side. It’s been developed using three decades of clinical information from the Intermountain Healthcare system of hospitals — and through a partnership with the renowned Mayo Clinic.

GE Healthcare’s partnership with Intermountain — which is explained in the video at left (click the icon at the bottom right of the screen to expand it) — comes as the Utah- and Idaho-based hospital system is drawing increased attention for its pioneering work in healthcare IT. As The New York Times recently noted in its in-depth look at Intermountain, “Making Health Care Better,” their “evidence-based” care is a mix of their rigorous treatment protocols, detailed measurement of actions and results, and electronic medical records designed to help more patients while helping hospitals become more efficient.

Marc Probst, Chief Information Officer of Intermountain Healthcare, says of today’s announcement — which targets a formal launch of the system later this year: “We partnered with GE to build Qualibria because we needed an innovative platform that would continue Intermountain’s history of clinical quality improvement while allowing us to share clinical best practices with other organizations who have a passion for improving their performance. We’re very proud of the contributions we’ve made to Qualibria and we believe that it will allow our institution and countless others to achieve new levels of quality.”

Vishal Wanchoo

In the audio clip below, Vishal Wanchoo, president and CEO of GE Healthcare IT, explains the partnership and how it fits in with GE’s healthymagination initiative:

As Dr. Graham Hughes, who is Vice President of Product Strategy for GE Healthcare’s Enterprise IT Solutions division, explained in a demo of the system during its pilot phase in October, a doctor who is making patient rounds can pull up lab results as needed rather than go to each patient’s records. While checking on one patient, alerts are signaled when a particular reading is out of normal range — and behind the buttons is information on each patient, including case histories and best care recommendations. It can enable even the smallest and most remote healthcare clinics to evaluate their current approach to patient care against constantly evolving standards. The end result is that patients everywhere may benefit from current treatment options.

GE also announced today that Mayo Clinic has agreed to an expanded collaboration on Qualibria. For the last two years, Mayo has helped build the system’s medical terminology management tools. The result is a platform that will help share clinical knowledge and best practices across organizations in a new, open architecture.

* Read today’s announcement about Qualibria
* Read today’s announcement from this week’s HIMSS conference

Learn more about our other Mayo and Intermountain partnerships in these GE Reports stories:
* “A breakthrough decision support solution for docs”
* “Inside the revolution at Intermountain Healthcare”
* “Mayo Clinic launches Intel/GE Home Health tech study”
* “Mayo Clinic team-up lets docs ‘feel’ livers with imaging”
* “GE and Intel team-up on home health tech”
* “London calling: Intel-GE health alliance expands to UK”

GE Healthcare got a close-up look at a 42,000 year-old baby woolly mammoth using state of the art medical equipment. Discovered in 2007 by a reindeer herder in northwestern Siberia, Lyuba (pronounced Lee-OO-bah) is considered the best-preserved mammoth ever discovered and researchers wanted to collect data to learn more about the life and features of this extinct species. As Tom Swerski, Project Manager of Exhibitions of The Field Museum, says in the video below: “A lot of the information Lyuba can provide is not visible on the surface, so to be able to see things through a CT scan or an MRI which show her internal organs and the structure beneath her skin is really important.”

In collaboration with the International Mammoth Committee (IMC) and The Field Museum, Lyuba was brought to the GE Healthcare Institute in Waukesha, WI to be imaged on three different systems. First, she was scanned on the Discovery CT750 HD, a 64-slice, high definition CT scanner. The images obtained from this scan allow scientists to learn more about her internal mineral deposits as well as her bone structure. Second, in an effort to see her entire skeletal structure from head to tail, she was imaged on the Innova® 4100^IQ, a three-dimensional digital X-ray system. Finally, Lyuba was scanned on a high performance open MRI system, the Signa OpenSpeed EXCITE 0.7T, to view her soft tissue including the brain, liver and heart.

“The emotions we felt in looking at these images were like those we experienced when we saw Lyuba for the first time,” says Daniel Fisher, a University of Michigan professor who has studied mammoths for 30 years and is an IMC member.

The scientists studying Lyuba also have been trying to determine what caused her death. As best as they can tell, she became trapped in a mud hole and inadvertently ingested mud. With the CT scan, the scientists now have evidence of silt in her trunk and in her lungs that confirm her cause of death as accidental suffocation. The cause of death is important because the scientists can reconfirm that Lyuba was not ill or poorly developed, factors that might negate her value as a normal mammoth specimen.

Lyuba is currently on loan from Russia for seven months and will be on display for the first time in the United States in the upcoming exhibition, Mammoths and Mastodons: Titans of the Ice Age opening March 5 at The Field Museum in Chicago. Photos of Lyuba’s visit to GE can be seen in the slide show below:

Gallery guide: Click on the small half-circles on the right and left side of the gallery to see more images. To magnify or reduce an image, either click on it or roll your mouse wheel.

Read “The art of digitally analyzing great art” on GE Reports

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

Back in April, we reported on a new alliance between GE and Intel Corporation to accelerate the innovation and commercialization of next-generation home health technologies — especially those designed for seniors and patients with chronic conditions. Today, Mayo Clinic announced that it will conduct a year-long research study to determine if home monitoring of patients with chronic diseases, using Intel’s remote patient monitoring technology, will reduce hospitalizations and emergency department visits.

House calls: In the video above Steve Agritelley of Intel’s Digital Heath Group tells how his team is developing technologies that offer the potential for more effective management of chronic health conditions. Source: http://www.intel.com/pressroom

As Omar Ishrak, President and CEO of Healthcare Systems at GE Healthcare points out, “Nearly 80 million baby-boomers in the U.S. are approaching ’seniors’ status, and they expect the best possible care.” At the same time the current system that requires face-to-face clinic visits is not a sustainable model. “By joining together with two world-class partners in this research study –Mayo Clinic and Intel — GE expects to gain valuable insight on how we can better deliver technologies that improve the lives of seniors and people with chronic illness,” he says.

The research study will involve 200 high-risk Mayo Clinic patients over age 60 who receive care in Rochester, Minnesota. Patients will measure their vital signs such as blood pressure, pulse and weight, and respond to questions specific to their diseases on a daily basis — with all data reviewed by the clinical care team working with their primary care provider. The technology, which also includes videoconferencing capability, allows the team to assess the patient for signs and symptoms suggesting clinical deterioration. The hope is that early recognition and treatment of a change in status will reduce the need for emergency department visits and hospitalizations.

Driving technologies that increase access to care while simultaneously reducing costs and increasing quality — such as home healthcare technologies — is the fundamental goal of GE’s healthymagination initiative. As part of their alliance, GE & Intel plan to invest $250 million over the next five years in research and development of home-based health technologies. In addition, GE Healthcare is selling and marketing the Intel Health Guide in the United States and the United Kingdom.

“Transforming healthcare requires more than just healthcare reform. It requires innovative thinking and the use of technology to change how and where care is delivered,” says Louis Burns, vice president and general manager of the Intel Digital Health Group. “We need to go beyond just hospital-and-clinic visits when we are sick — to home and community-based care models that allow for prevention, early detection, behavior change and social support. This study is an example of how we are looking to address this.”

Read more in these GE Reports stories:
* “GE and Intel team-up on home health tech”
* “Remote healthcare tech: There’s no place like home”
* “Home health monitoring growth eyed in QuietCare buy”
* “London calling: Intel-GE health alliance expands to UK”

* Read today’s announcement
* Learn more about the Mayo Clinic
* Learn more about the Intel-GE alliance
* Learn more about the Intel Health Guide

Today, GE signed a new agreement with the Government of Pakistan that aims to help the country of over 180 million people modernize in critical areas such as water, energy and transportation. Pakistan today produces about 20,000 megawatts of power each year — but that need is likely to nearly triple by 2020 when the country’s energy demand is expected to increase to 54,000 megawatts annually. As a result, Pakistan is eyeing a range of diverse power generation sources — from renewables like wind and solar to conventional gas and steam turbine-driven systems. Today’s agreement is what’s known as a Memorandum of Understanding, or M.O.U., and is similar to ones that have been reached with other governments around the world including Kazakhstan, Nigeria, and the Province of Ontario, Canada.

Mod squad: “There are huge synergies between the products and services GE businesses provide in energy and infrastructure and the needs and goals of Pakistan to modernize its economy with cleaner, more efficient and better infrastructure technologies,” says Nani Beccalli-Falco, President and Chief Executive Officer of GE International. “General Electric is helping build the energy, water, transportation and technology infrastructure of the new century.” Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city and main seaport and financial center, is pictured above.

Pakistan is also exploring renewable energy sources such as geothermal, biomass, and hydro-electric power for its modernization projects. In conventional power generation, the government is also looking to rehabilitate existing power generation facilities. At the same time, the country is pursuing a transportation development plan that aims for more efficient and environmentally sound rail systems — and a water program that ranges from purification and reuse to wastewater treatment.

As part of the agreement, GE is not only exploring technology solutions, but it is also working to identify potential sources of funding as well as potential investment opportunities.

GE is no stranger to Pakistan, having operated in the country since its formation. GE is also involved with the country’s ambitious National Clean Water Initiative, which will use GE ultrafiltration systems at over a thousand distribution sites. The initiative is expected to improve the lives of over one million people by providing them with access to treated water that meets World Health Organization standards. And Pakistan’s first renewable energy project to use sugarcane-waste biogas created from the production of ethanol is powered by eight of GE Energy’s ecomagination Jenbacher biogas engines. It’s designed to generate enough power to support more than 50,000 homes in Pakistan.

* Read today’s announcement
* Read the Associated Press of Pakistan’s coverage
* Read about GE’s current work with Nigeria on GE Reports
* Read “GE & Kazakhstan ink major rail service & plant deals” on GE Reports