Solving for the Future: Precision, quality &accessible healthcare

At the forefront of digital innovation is technology-enabled healthcare, which is designed to revolve around people rather than places and builds upon preventive, predictive, and personalized health to enable timely and affordable preventive healthcare, precision diagnosis, and treatment to all. Raghavendra VS, Head – Sales, GE HealthCare South Asia elaborates on the importance of technology to develop holistic solutions in healthcare.

What are the key challenges that need to be addressed in the health tech industry?

In our country, with its large geography and tough terrain, it's impossible for people to move around, transport themselves and get access to healthcare. It is important to design solutions that are affordable in nature and think of how we make them more accessible. The physical nature of how you can house this equipment in locations that are challenged on power space and most importantly the skill needed for operating.

We do have a team that is focused on helping customers in education and competency-building measures across the journey in healthcare diagnosis and treatment. This is the first area that you would have to continue to evolve. Wipro GE Healthcare Medical Device Manufacturing facility which was launched in 2022—an initiative to leverage the PLI scheme of Government of India, is trying to solve some of these problems.

Wipro GE Healthcare Medical Device Manufacturing is a multi-SBU facility for manufacturing imaging, DCAR, monitoring solutions, interventional and ultrasound products which comprises of CT machines, cath lab equipment, ultrasound scanners, patient monitoring solutions and ECG machines. The CT machine was completely assembled using state-of-the-art manufacturing practices across four stages followed by a testing stage to ensure functionality and image quality, all at the MDM facility. Lean Action workout involving size simulation of manufacturing line for the CT was conducted to simulate the process flow. The learnings from that were in turn used as inputs for the new MDM facility.

Today we design, develop and manufacture close to 30+ products out of that initiative, which was otherwise not possible. That’s a great example of how we are moving the needle on affordability.

The second one is available across the length and breadth of the organization and helps us drive the message of what healthcare solutions can do for patients and clinicians. This is another segment that we will continue to work on.  The third one is on virtual care which is at the intersection of technology communication and smarter devices. In the healthcare sector, it's not as much of a challenge, rather it's a great opportunity that MedTech organizations like us should be solving for. The initiatives that we have taken put us in a good state in terms of what we have done so far and what we can do in the future.

Can you elaborate more on how you solve these problems through solutions you bring to the market?

Patients today deal with multiple sets of challenges like finding the right hospital, with the right infrastructure and well-equipped clinicians. We try to solve problems and better address patient needs from a healthcare technology standpoint through innovative products and solutions. For example,our widely used equipment like ECG, there is a training requirement for the clinicians and technicians who are operating the machine so that the analysis is not misinterpreted. We understood this significant gap and designed a product that interprets the ECG by itself and gives a firsthand report to the physician at the point of care.

We've also launched Revolution Aspire—an advanced imaging solution designed and manufactured end-to-end in India, at the newly launched Wipro GE Medical Devices Manufacturing plant, in line with ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat’ initiative.  The CT system is equipped with higher imaging intelligence to improve clinical confidence when diagnosing diseases and anomalies.It is a great example of solving what patients need both in terms of product and how healthcare delivery in apartment locations becomes better. Initially, this product was supposed to be a product with a lower cost but as we move forward, we felt that this system can be made much more intelligent and do a lot more than what it is capable of. In India space is a big constraint, we may have a large land but when the scanners have to be installed in specific locations or geographies space becomes a huge constraint. Creating products that are smarter, drive more output with less input, and are more productive because they can be housed in small spaces and at the same time deliver the needs of their clinician is something that we are working on.

Accessibility as you mentioned is a key issue. Any initiatives and collaborations that you have undertaken to scale access to quality care?

We do realize that we can't serve all the healthcare needs that patients have.Let me explain this with an example.  Considering oncology, which is a growing disease and the burden of it is also enormous. You don’t have a single MedTech or device that can cover the whole portfolio of all the solutions that it requires but at the same time, we also can't stray away from the strength that we have which is technology and imaging. We have partnered with Elekta, a leader in radiation therapy. The agreement between GE HealthCare and Elekta allows us to offer hospitals in any country oncology solutions that feature both companies’ tools and equipment. This would include GE HealthCare’s radiation oncology solutions — CT, PET simulators, MRI simulators and ultrasound imaging technology — which providers use to pinpoint tumors, noting their size, characteristics and location in relation to healthy tissue so that Elekta’s radiotherapy treatments can be applied to the right targets in individual patients. These are primarily found in the breast, prostate, lung or brain.The GE HealthCare-Elekta collaboration may also allow healthcare providers to suggest treatments to cancer patients in emerging markets, who might not otherwise be able to access them.

Similarly, diseases of the heart are an extremely important non-communicable disease, and we don't have all that we need from a patient perspective. We have partnered with Boston Scientific a global medical device manufacturer, to provide end-to-end innovative interventional cardiac care solutions in India. With the collaboration we aim to unlock the potential of interventional cardiology, offer better heart care by building efficiency across the care pathway journey of the patient and deliver precision care.

Seeing the importance of tech solutions, we also collaborated with Cath Lab Efficiency Manager, analytical tool that analyzes the performance of an interventional lab providing hospitals with important data they can use to identify areas of improvement. Cath Lab Efficiency Manager provides a near-real-time dashboard which displays measures of inefficiency and identifies the factors impacting performance. The tool visualizes where changes can be made to help increase productivity and help improve patient care.

To take our solutions to wider audiences, we have also invested in a company by the name GenWorks which is the distribution arm for GE HealthCare to drive more coverage in tier II and III cities. More than 550 districts are now being covered between GE dealers and GenWorks. Investment in GenWorks is a testimony to our promise of bridging the treatment gap and enhancing care delivery across India. With the broad spectrum of Wipro GE Healthcare products, the healthcare providers have a strong opportunity to build a robust portfolio and provide quality healthcare across all of India. The speed with which you can reach those markets, drive awareness and make them adopt solutions will be better in terms of enabling people in driving healthcare delivery better.

How do you leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to solve healthcare problems?

We base our attention on AI on two to three pillars. You need a platform on which you can build AI solutions to address current and future issues. The second aspect of it is how to make sure that more applications are being created without sacrificing quality, allowing AI to become much more comprehensive and broader. All AI is created on a platform known as Edison. Through the platform, we are working with startups to ensure they develop products that can be tested and validated on our Edison platforms.

We have a very active program of working with startups whereby we have completed 3 cohorts where we invite startups to develop AI tools that can be tested on our platforms that have huge computing capabilities and validate their application before they finally get launched. The AI tools we want to bring for healthcare diagnosis are evolved, and there is a lot to do looking at the patient's changing needs.

Today, most of these AI applications and medical equipment have great management measures from a quality regulatory standpoint. By harnessing data and leveraging artificial intelligence, we can help our customers deliver precision care — an approach to healthcare that puts the patient at the center of their treatment. Everything that we bring in goes to the stringent measures of quality and regulations and these AI applications have been certified by FDA before they are deployed.

Can you elaborate on the precision care service provided by GE HealthCare?

Precision care in simple words means empowering clinicians with the data and tools they need for making a difference to patients through intelligent technology. The key to the future of medicine and GE HealthCare's opportunity is to connect patient data across a provider's digital ecosystem so that clinicians can access it whenever they want and use it to customize diagnoses and treatments for each patient.

We can help our customers in providing precision care, a method of providing healthcare that centres the patient at the heart of their treatment, by utilising AI and data collection.

Raghavendra VS, Head – Sales, GE healthcare, South Asia

By Pratima H