The new year began with a bang for GE HealthCare.
In 2018, GE announced plans to spin off its healthcare business into an independent enterprise. On Jan. 4, GE HealthCare officially spun off and began trading on the Nasdaq.
In such a rapidly changing field as healthcare, the company is aware of how different conditions are in 2023 compared to 2018.
"I believe we could not start our new journey at a more exciting time for healthcare," Catherine Estrampes, U.S. and Canada president and CEO of GE HealthCare, told Becker's. "We know COVID-19 has changed a lot of things for our customers, and I think all of them are really looking for productivity and efficiency solutions to deal with physician burnout and patient backlog."
GE HealthCare is looking toward artificial intelligence-embedded applications in GE devices to improve the efficiency and productivity challenges that hospitals deal with on a daily basis.
AI and digital health are expected to be core parts of GE HealthCare's business. In March, the company started the development of its Edison Digital Health Platform, designed to accelerate app integration and digital transformation for health systems.
The company has more than 200 software apps, according to a GE HealthCare fact sheet shared with Becker's.
"We understand that COVID-19 has created new challenges and new opportunities for healthcare executives," Ms. Estrampes said. "In the fact, they have to deliver care across the patient journey. The message to them is that we know we can improve lives through enabling precision care, connecting multimodal data from multiple sources can help diagnose disease faster."
What health systems can look out for
While hospital executives are increasingly anxious about Big Tech disruptors like Amazon encroaching on their core business, Ms. Estrampes sees GE HealthCare's role as a more collaborative approach to working with health systems.
"[GE HealthCare] will really be partners of healthcare providers in better outcomes, more efficiency and more productivity," she said. "Overall, our goal is to bring more value to clinicians and the patients."
The company has tapped into hospital talent to help craft its business strategy, naming Renton, Wash.-based Providence President and CEO Rodney Hochman, MD, and Cleveland Clinic President and CEO Tom Mihaljevic, MD, to its board of directors.
GE HealthCare is organizing its $18 billion company into four segments: imaging, ultrasound, patient care solutions and pharmaceutical diagnostics.
The company has been considering acquisitions as a way to hit the ground running. In December, Bloomberg reported that GE HealthCare was one of the parties eyeing a potential acquisition of Medtronic's $7 billion patient monitoring and respiratory intervention business units.
A stable economic outlook
Despite an uncertain economic forecast and continued mass layoffs at large tech companies, analysts see GE HealthCare's position as stable. Credit rating agency Fitch assigned the company a "BBB" rating following the spinoff.
"Fitch views long-term industry growth as sustainable, driven by an aging population, increasing prevalence and diagnosis of chronic disease, innovation in minimally-invasive procedures that require imaging, technological innovations such as AI and machine learning, and expansion of health care settings," Fitch said in the Jan. 4 report.
While acknowledging the risk of an economic downturn, the company has projected that its markets will expand from $84 billion in 2021 to $102 billion by 2025.
"There is a risk of a global recession. At the same time, we have been a solid performer inside GE for many years," Ms. Estrampes said. "We have strong resilience through ups and downs in the market, including during COVID-19. What I see today in the U.S. and Canada is higher market demand."
While managing the global recession risk, the company sees the spinoff as an opportunity to maintain its GE roots and innovate in new ways.
"When I think about what is going to be different," Ms. Estrampes said, "is keeping our GE legacy of innovation, integrity and a strong culture while, at the same time, also adopting a more agile purpose-driven culture to make decisions faster, be more flexible, have a greater integration in the healthcare system and greater ability to take calculated risks, which might not have been as possible when we were part of a large industry conglomerate."