In the year following its spin-off, GE HealthCare has continued to lead in innovations within medical technology, intelligent devices, and care solutions, driving precision care and enhancing patient outcomes. Spyros Gkikas-Panousis, President and General Manager for Greece and Cyprus at GE HealthCare and Chair of the AmCham Greece Medical Devices and Diagnostics Committee, shares insights with Business Partners on the spin-off, the company’s inaugural year as an independent entity, and its dedication to advancing innovation and harnessing digital capabilities to empower both clinicians and patients.
Since 2023, GE HealthCare has stood as an independent entity. Can you give us a brief rundown of the separation and the newly independent company?
January 4, 2024, marked GE HealthCare’s one-year anniversary as a standalone company. Our spinoff from GE was one of the largest in medtech history. We remain just as excited about the incredible opportunity to create value as a focused healthcare company. For more than 125 years, GE HealthCare has shaped the way care is delivered around the world. Both research and development and commercial innovation are at the core of our company DNA. As we enter the future as an independent company, we’re bringing the best of that heritage, while evolving our business to be more agile, customer-centric, and digital.
The future of healthcare is in becoming more human and personalized
GE HealthCare is a $19.6 billion business with over 51,000 colleagues committed to making it easier for clinicians to provide quality care and improve patient outcomes. Each year, we serve more than one billion patients, facilitating more than two billion procedures. Our portfolio of solutions in our imaging, ultrasound, patient care solutions, and pharmaceutical diagnostics segments addresses the biggest challenges facing healthcare providers and patients today and is complemented by our broad services capabilities and digital solutions.
From day one as a standalone, the company hit the ground running. Tell us about this first year.
Over the last year, we’ve made significant strides in becoming a more people-, patient- and customer- focused company. We’ve invested over $1 billion in R&D for future growth and released more than 40 breakthrough innovations in 2023. We are leading the industry with FDA-approved AI-embedded applications in our devices. And we’re continuing to celebrate major milestones that preceded the spinoff, including 50 years in computed tomography (CT), 40 years of renowned Signa magnetic resonance (MR), 30 years of the award-winning Logiq ultrasound, and 30 years since the installation of our first cyclotron.
It’s an exciting time for the company and we continue to receive extremely positive feedback from employees, customers, and investors following the spinoff. Our teams have rallied around our shared purpose of creating a world where healthcare has no limits, and I can feel the pride and commitment to delivering for our customers and their patients every day. Together, we’re digitalizing healthcare, driving productivity to improve the lives of patients, and creating meaningful efficiencies for providers, health systems, and researchers around the world.
We are not adjusting to digital technologies—we are shaping and co-creating them
GE HealthCare prides itself on being a leader in precision care. In practical terms, what does this entail?
One of the biggest challenges for healthcare providers is improving patient outcomes and customizing care to the specific individual while balancing costs and productivity. Done right, you can have both better patient outcomes and increased provider productivity, eliminating unnecessary procedures, waste, and time spent and getting the right diagnosis and therapy sooner.
In today’s current environment, this is not easy to achieve due to the disparate systems, devices, and data that exists in unstructured forms throughout the care model. The key is the patient’s longitudinal data, synthesized to enable insights about the best path forward for them—or in other words, connecting data from across multiple sources that can help diagnose a disease faster and even predict how an individual will respond to a particular treatment.
In a world of expensive therapies, predicting response can ultimately make a huge difference in outcomes and costs. Putting the patient at the center of their personalized treatment and integrating a patient’s multimodal data, from images to genomic profile, pave the way to the most appropriate treatment. Precision care is enabled by precision diagnostics, precision treatment, and monitoring.
We execute on our precision care strategy at the forefront of care delivery throughout the patient journey, across key disease areas such as cardiology, neurology, and oncology. Because of our insider role in healthcare and the digital nature of the information we provide, we are uniquely positioned to lead in precision care, building on our strong industry foundation. Our global scale and reach, enterprise-level relationships, clinical knowledge, and scientific capabilities have us already advancing the field, and we understand how to integrate AI tools into clinical workflow and enable better outcomes. Our approach to precision care builds on the more than four million GE HealthCare devices in use around the world, focused on major disease areas and enabled by our digital capabilities.
Innovation is clearly key to the company’s vision. What are some recent projects you’re excited about?
Together with our partners, we are developing new capabilities for the future, leveraging emerging technologies and machine learning. As a global company, we are forging international partnerships that will also have an impact on a local level in the future.
For example, in 2023, we announced several exciting developments and collaborations in the field of ultrasound. We were honored to have received a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop ultrasound tools for less experienced healthcare professionals and support more effective obstetric and lung ultrasound screening for patients in low- and middle-income countries. We also signed a contract with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), a division within the US Department of Health and Human Services, to develop advanced ultrasound technology with new AI applications for patients with lung pathologies and traumatic injuries.
We announced a collaboration with Novo Nordisk to advance the clinical and product development of peripheral focused ultrasound. This marks our introduction into therapeutic ultrasound exploring non-invasive, non-pharmacological methods to treat chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes and obesity. Encouraging pre-clinical and early clinical data indicate potential use for people with type 2 diabetes, and we are incredibly excited about the potential for this novel technology and its impact on improving patient care.
Moreover, GE HealthCare announced it is assuming the leading industrial role of Predictom, a consortium project that aims to develop an AI-screening platform to identify individuals at risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
With innovation in mind, how does being an independent company affect how you move into and contribute to shaping the future of healthcare?
We are a proven innovator with a history of delivering industry firsts to advance the future of healthcare. Today, we have more flexibility to invest in innovation and growth, with a combination of acquisitions as well as R&D from within GE HealthCare. We’ve already seen this with acquisitions announced in our time as an independent company – Imactis in interventional CT, Caption Health in AI-enabled ultrasound, or MIM Software in medical imaging workflow software and AI solutions. It’s an early testament to how we are already delivering on our growth strategy.
We believe that the future of healthcare is in becoming more human and personalized. In the next 10 years, we will witness more profound changes in healthcare than in the last 100 years. Just imagine a world where healthcare is powered by AI, cloud technologies, as well as smart drugs and value-based care. AI is central to the company’s digital strategy, which as I mentioned previously, is focused on its precision care framework that includes smart devices, targeted therapies, disease-specific focus, and digital solutions.
Our advancements in digital solutions, such as AI and machine learning, address disease management, and our smart technologies are designed to streamline clinician processes, personalize care, and enhance the overall patient journey. We are not adjusting to digital technologies—we are shaping and co-creating them! In 2024, we’ll continue to build out our AI-based capabilities and advance our SaaS-based solutions approach and offerings to include cloud-enabled devices and more apps.
We are working to enable precision care with our D3 strategy: smart devices focused on specific disease states, enabled by digital and AI solutions. Continuing to innovate across our outstanding product portfolio of equipment is goal number one. Our relevance as a leader is critical in bringing precision innovation from a device perspective and providing upgrade paths to our large customer base. Fundamentally, our care pathway strategy allows us to stand out to our customers, by being less transactional and more focused on addressing their needs and building long-term relationships.
In a few short words, what does the spinoff and the new opportunities it brings mean to you?
At GE HealthCare, we address today’s biggest challenges to healthcare across the care continuum. By focusing on critical care pathways such as oncology, cardiology, and neurology, GE HealthCare is creating new value for customers and patients from diagnosis to treatment. The foundation of our care approach is our emphasis on streamlined processes and core platforms with interoperability between tools, instead of multiple platforms and ecosystems. Since spinning off, I see greater empowerment for local decisionmaking that is closest to our customers, allowing us to integrate more seamlessly into the healthcare ecosystem. We remain focused on making hospitals more efficient, clinicians more effective, therapies more precise, and patients healthier and happier
