GE Healthcare to invest in enhanced training for over two million health professionals globally by 2020

In developed countries like the U.S., Europe and parts of Asia, healthcare leaders are trying to optimize efficiency, systems integration, data analytics and achieve greater productivity. In emerging economies, enabling access to affordable, basic primary care is often the most pressing concern. Healthcare systems around the world face a wide range of difficult challenges. All could benefit from training and education solutions focused specifically on their particular needs.

To help address this issue, GE Healthcare today announced a plan to invest more than $1 billion over five years in the development of its educational offerings to reach more than two million healthcare professionals worldwide by 2020, helping them improve healthcare from within through enhanced training programs and solutions for physicians, radiologists, technologists, midwives, nurses, biomedical engineers and beyond. Solutions will be geared to meet local needs and will include new clinical, product application, technical and leadership training and education.

“Challenges around localized capacity building, training and innovation are consistent themes for many healthcare systems and Ministries of Health around the world,” said John Flannery, President & CEO of GE Healthcare. “We will continue to work closely with local governments, institutions and customers to address some of their most important concerns. In some countries, this will mean training midwives to use new ultrasound or portable diagnostic equipment. In others, it will include supporting multi-hospital networks to enhance their clinical and operational outcomes.”

A $1 Billion Investment in Transformational Change

As part of this training commitment, GE Healthcare will continue to work with healthcare providers to build strategic programs that may also include technology, finance and consultancy services to help improve healthcare delivery and drive transformational change in the industry.

“Our focus is to develop meaningful, relevant education solutions that will help healthcare professionals create long-term value and positive measurable impact. By combining our heritage in medical technology, healthcare IT, software and life sciences, we can provide enhanced learning, insights and best practices that can make a real difference,” said Mario Lois, General Manager, Global Education Services at GE Healthcare.

GE Healthcare will provide on-the-ground, online and remote training mostly as part of a commercial partnership with customers to help optimize health providers’ skills for real life clinical situations. Examples of implementation could include peer-to-peer training provided by key opinion leaders among customers; virtual video conference training; clinical product training by certified clinical applications specialists; biomedical training supervised by technical instructors; and leadership training managed by certified GE professionals and consultants. GE Healthcare expects its new education solutions to upskill healthcare professionals worldwide and drive further growth in the industry.

Building on Success Across Markets

This program builds on GE Healthcare’s existing global training initiatives, including:

• Skill India Initiative, developed by GE Healthcare, brings together healthcare and education experts to train and educate more than 100,000 new and existing healthcare professionals in India over the next five years.
• GE Foundation has worked alongside local Ministries of Health for more than a decade through its Developing Health Globally initiative. In parallel, to address some of the most critical health challenges in East Africa, GE recently announced a $14.7 million commitment for skills development and capacity building through GE Healthcare’s first-ever healthcare skills advancement center in Kenya and other GE Foundation training initiatives.
• A new $100 million commitment was announced in February 2015 for the development and delivery of localized education and training offerings to help address health challenges in Africa, Turkey, the Middle East and Russia and CIS by 2018. This commitment builds on the opening of the Healthcare Skills and Training Institute in 2013, launched in partnership with King Fahad Medical City in Saudi Arabia, the first GE Healthcare training center to be located at a customer site, which has trained over 6,000 healthcare professionals to date.
• GE Healthcare, working with the Chinese Medical Doctors Association (CMDA), has trained more than 6,500 rural doctors in China since 2011 through 36 sessions, featuring professors as guest lecturers from influential Level 3 hospitals across China.
• In collaboration with Senai (National Service for Industrial Training), GE Healthcare has invested $3.5 million since 2012 to develop technical and clinical hands-on courses for healthcare providers in Brazil.
• Early results from GE Healthcare’s new approaches in Europe show more than a 300% increase in remote expert training sessions, better addressing health professionals’ needs for continuous training and on-demand expert clinical application support.
• For more than five decades, GE’s Leadership Centre in Crotonville, New York, has been the epicenter for GE’s world-renowned training programs for transformational thinking in areas such as leadership development, change management, organizational culture and innovation.

Taking Patient Care To A Whole New Level, Worldwide

GE Healthcare is developing new education solutions around two critical goals – greater access and measurable outcomes. For example, there are ongoing global pilots of a new class of remotely-controlled robotic telepresence training solutions that will enable any GE expert or clinical partner to deliver highly effective, interactive, hands-on training sessions for practically any device and any user in a given hospital, regardless of the expert trainer’s location. These new solutions hope to provide an experience and effectiveness that’s remarkably close to the trainer being physically there, working with them.

GE Healthcare is also working on maximizing the quality and measurable impact of its new training solutions. Some of these new outcome-based education offerings leverage data and analytics to better identify training needs and translate them into customized training plans, with the ability to measure “before and after” impact on key metrics, such as reduction on radiation dose or patient throughput.

“Healthcare providers continue to experience increased patient volumes and decreased time for training. And it’s clear to us that the skills of healthcare professionals using medical equipment are at least as impactful on the resulting outcomes, as the quality of the product itself. Healthcare providers will be able to embrace new GE education solutions, to better train their staff, optimize equipment use, and ultimately improve patient care,” concluded Lois.

About GE Healthcare

GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services to meet the demand for increased access, enhanced quality and more affordable healthcare around the world. GE (NYSE: GE) works on things that matter - great people and technologies taking on tough challenges. From medical imaging, software & IT, patient monitoring and diagnostics to drug discovery, biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies and performance improvement solutions, GE Healthcare helps medical professionals deliver great healthcare to their patients. For more information visit our website www.gehealthcare.com.

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