GE HealthCare
(Nasdaq: GEHC)
has made enterprise partnerships, called Care Alliances, a large part of its recent strategy.
These enterprise partnerships feature multi-year collaborations to enhance financial and operational efforts. The Chicago-based company helps healthcare systems prioritize scalability and flexibility to support growth, stability and adaptability amid an evolving market with changing needs.
Recent enterprise deals include a 14-year partnership with UC San Diego Health inked this month, as well as a seven-year deal with Sutter Health. The company also recently inked AI-based partnerships with two health systems.
Catherine Estrampes, president & CEO of U.S. & Canada at GE HealthCare, recently spoke to MassDevice at AdvaMed’s The MedTech Conference in San Diego, outlining the company’s approach to these partnerships and how they benefit healthcare systems.
The following has been lightly edited for space and clarity.
Why are large healthcare systems interested in enterprise partnerships with GE HealthCare?
Catherine Estrampes: “We always start with the customer. It’s listening and it’s understanding their challenges, their opportunities, their vision, their aspiration. so that as we put the patient, the operations and the and the and the financials front and center on both sides, we actually have an opportunity to align and design the solutions that are going to work for them and for and for the collaboration.”
“What we are trying to help them solve is really around three or four areas. The first is, they need to improve access to the communities. That means having the right technology in the right location. The second challenge that we see is financial pressure. With the ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’ with Medicaid, these challenges create a handicap for them. If you add to that the consolidation happening in the market and the large aging install base from a technology perspective, it creates even more financial urgency.”
How does GE HealthCare approach the financial pressures in these partnerships?
CE: “The way we think about it is, we can help them with structuring models of our partnerships that are going to allow for scalable and predictable investments over the years, as opposed to fragmented, year-by-year acquisitions. Under that challenge, how do we help them create more revenue? Think about oncology or cardiology. How do we help them? [We help] with advanced technology, solutions, workflow, design, education. We help them create more revenue by creating services, centers of excellence around oncology.”
“The last challenge is really the workflow and the burnout of the techs and the physicians. The way we help here is digital and AI solutions. We see the desire for deeper partnerships and for multi-year, multi-modality types of agreements to ensure a more predictable relationship between partners.”
The impact of GE HealthCare’s digital services in these partnerships
CE: “[Digital] is one of the key pillars. We see a lot of limits in healthcare today, with workflow, physician burnout, cognitive overload. These are reall problems that digital and AI can actually address. We have a framework that we call D-3, which is smart devices, disease states and the care pathway and digital and AI. Those pillars of the framework are really meant to improve patient outcomes, drive efficiencies and support out customers in their financial journey.”
“Today, we lead the industry with about 100 FDA-supported AI applications on the operational side and on the clinical side. One is called Sonic DL, which is proven to decrease scan time. … while improving imaging resolution by 50%-55%. That’s an example that shows how we are addressing digital and AI and addressing the patient.”
The importance of the care pathways
CE: “[One pillar] is all about the innovation along the care pathway, from early detection to confirmation of the diagnostic to support the therapy to the therapy and our monitoring, we have advanced technology along the entire pathway. Whether it is in prostate cancer, or structural heart, we invest in that disease state.”
“We work with our customers under those enterprise partnerships to not only bring the advanced technology and solutions, the digital and AI, but we are also going to help design better workflows, bring education around technology and we might bring financing. We’re taking that approach to make sure that we help them throughout the entire journey.”
What kinds of tangible outcomes has GE HealthCare seen from these partnerships?
CE: “With digital and AI, there’s innovation there as well. It’s really software services and predictive analytics to help healthcare systems drive quality healthcare at scale. We have a command center, which is really software services and predictive analytics to help with managing capacity versus demand, managing the availability or operations of a department of an enterprise. We have a collaboration going on with Duke on our latest version of our command center and recently proved that they have been able to save $40 million on temporary labor costs. They have also improved the bed assignment time by 66%. Again, it plays on efficiencies and revenues.”
“We have several examples of these Care Alliances — our name for enterprise partnerships — and one is a recent one, 18 months, is seeing some very favorable early outcomes. It’s a regional health system, not for profit. We deploy technologies throughout the entire system with standardization of protocols, with digital and AI solutions. They are seeing their MR and CT [imaging] wait times go from six weeks to less than one week. Because of shorter scan times, because of AI solutions, they have been able to create an additional 59 slots per week for procedures. Think about the increase in revenue as well.”
How do you address the individual needs of each health system?
CE: “It starts with the customer and understanding their vision, their challenges, their strategy, their aspirations. They are in different states. Make no mistake, many of those healthcare systems have the same issues around increasing access, financial pressure, efficiencies. These are themes that come back on a regular basis because this is what they are all living. I think there are commonalities that allow us to baseline everything and then we basically work with them on what their priorities are. For some, it is going to be accelerating or improving access dramatically in the outpatient world because they don’t have outpatient centers.”
“There is a baseline that is common, then there are their priorities, which we align to. Then, we really believe in a strong governance model, meeting on a quarterly basis. It’s a very formal process by which we review what we have committed together, we have predefined KPIs that we measure progress on. Because of the dynamics in the U.S. from a healthcare perspective, at times we have to pivot becuase their strategies or their priorities have changed, because they made a new acquisition or they divested in some way. We are able to have that flexibility to align and the financial modeling gives us that same flexibility.”
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