An Introduction GE HealthCare Patient Care Solutions

Matt Smith: Hi, everybody. Welcome. This is our podcast series on digital solutions that ease the way for care teams. I'm Matt Smith with GE HealthCare Marketing. We're reporting from the exhibit hall today. And to help kick this podcast series off, I'm joined by Tom Westrick, president of GE HealthCare Patient Care Solutions, and also Roshy Francis, Chief Technology Officer for Patient Care solutions. Good morning, gentlemen.

All: Good morning. How you doing, Matt?

Matt Smith: So, let's start with Tom. For many listeners, attendees, this is really the first opportunity to meet the new post spin, GE HealthCare, help everybody kind of learn about the role that Patient Care Solutions plays and the evolution that's come about. And lastly, maybe walk us through the legacy of Patient Care Solutions.

Tom Westrick: Sure, sounds good. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to HIMSS 2023 in Chicago. Roshy, thanks for joining me up here. Matt, thanks for organizing this session. So, yes, we spun out of GE on January 4 of 2023, and one of the four segments in GE HealthCare is Patient Care Solutions. So Patient Care Solutions. What is it? What products, what solutions do we offer within our segment? So, we have a long history, decades of innovation, high-branded, clinically relevant solutions that provide care in the most critical care areas across the entire healthcare ecosystem. So, it's our big business within PCS, as we call it, is Monitoring Solutions, which you'll see monitors throughout the entire healthcare patient care need environment. Literally millions of patient monitors across the world today. You head into the OR, you'll see our anesthesia solutions and delivery devices that have a very strong position in the OR. Diagnostic Cardiology, our EKG, one of our long-standing legacy businesses, one of the most recognizable tools to detect heart disease, our EKG systems. And then you get into Maternal Infant Care in the labor and delivery wards with our incubators and our warmers. And then you add all to that Digital Solutions and digital enhancers that really get at helping workflow in addition to patient care specific needs, helping workflow across the healthcare ecosystem.

So, we are blessed with a great group of people. We're blessed with tremendous customers. We have been in this business for a long time. That's been demonstrated by our strong brand of quality and our attention to detail that you just can't get it wrong in this particular space. And we've been great here. So that's PCS in a nutshell, it's great.

Matt Smith: So, following up on the spin-out, it really comes at a critical time, not just for our US healthcare system, but really healthcare globally. Based on the conversations that you've had with our customers and some of the other leaders within healthcare, can you elaborate on some of those challenges that you've seen?

Tom Westrick: Yes, I think any provider that's going to work every day is seeing the challenges in our industry. Patient care demands are at an all-time high. The availability of labor is a massive issue. Some would say that we'll be 3 million short of clinicians in the next, like, five to seven years. So that it's not going away, and the costs are extremely high. The data information is, we're in overload mode. You really go anywhere, and we're not helping the world, we're not helping our clinicians to provide care in the most efficient and effective way. There's just too much information. It's either not real time or it's not specialized enough and specific enough to help tailored workflows to actually improve care at very specific moments in time. So, data, not enough of it, not specific enough, often too much. And the labor issues are just contributing to a very tough environment from our customers and companies like GE HealthCare and PCS. We need to step up and play a different role to help our customers to get through this tough time.

Matt Smith: Okay, so keeping on the topic of data challenges, we're going to throw it over to Roshy. We talk about the challenges that healthcare providers face related to data usability. We've got a second session with Roshy right after this on data usability. So, there's a plug. So, data usability and data overload. How do you see our industry partners finding untapped value for this healthcare data?

Roshy Francis: Yeah. Thanks, Matt. The concept of data combined with usability is an evolving concept. We have taken the traditionally known idea of usability that is applied to medical technology, and we are starting to apply that to data because database decisions matter. And sometimes that doesn't mean that we can just take all of the data around the patient and throw it at clinicians, because that really contributes to the cognitive overload that the clinicians are feeling and contributes to a problem rather than a solution, right? So, what we want to do is bring the data around that patient in a true patient-centric manner, integrate them in a meaningful way, different data sources that capture maybe one aspect of the patient one at a time. 
Integrate them, make them intelligently combined using smart algorithms, convert them into insights, and deliver it to the right clinician at the right time, using the right pane of glass that they are used to looking at, right? So that they don't have to swivel chair and look at a totally different system and log into a totally different system. And that's really in a nutshell, that's really the concept of data usability that is increasingly becoming relevant for our industry to address some of the challenges that we're seeing.

Matt Smith: So, a lot of moving pieces that are going on. And so next question back to Tom. What are some of these pieces needed to not just avoid contributing to the problem further? Again, jumping off of Roshy's answer, what type of untapped value within healthcare data can we find?

Tom Westrick: That's a great answer, Roshy. I think Roshy described a relatively simple solution to a very complicated problem. How do you provide the right information at the right time to the right person to have that specific action, that's patient-specific is not an easy task. Our industry has years, if not decades, of producing information, either specific information for a patient, the department... And our clinicians have been used to dealing with our equipment versus provide the other way around of how do we provide our information in a more useful way so our clinicians can improve the way they're providing care and ultimately improve patient outcomes and not have to deal with the underlying technology as much as we have.

So, our focus and our pillars have been in our industry. Strength is on our device portfolio, as I mentioned earlier, we've been here forever. But how do we use the information differently in the future than how we're using it today? The information today, I'd say in the past, has been more linked to very specific relationships between one particular clinician and the patient. And how is that information provided to provide care at that one level?

So how do we take it to the next level? How do you provide information that is departmental, and sometimes enterprise wide, in the case of Command Center, that helps provide overall workflow improvements, simplified workflows that help clinicians get through their day, honestly, in some cases in a simple way, in a much more easy way, that ultimately provides care in a more specified way? So, some of the products that we're introducing, you'll see many of these on our floor today, really around how do you present information in a more tailored way. That's precisely the information real time in a care area, and a couple of examples I'll mention will be labor and Delivery in the ICU, that's very specific-tailored to the use cases and the specific care needs for that particular department, that allow for clinicians to act in a more tailored-specific way, that's consistent with protocols and the overall guidelines in a specific department.

Mural labor and Delivery, which is on display here, is a good example of that. In the labor and Delivery, and this is primarily a US product that has global reach, is taking information from multiple medical devices, not just ours, but across really the whole spectrum, what you'd find in a typical care setting. And is displaying that on a one plane of glass that very simply lays out the information that particular labor and delivery nurse, in this example, needs to see to provide care to mom and baby in a very tailored way. There's protocols within our plane of glass called Mural L&D that lay out specific parameters, such hemorrhage or hypertension, that monitors those type of potential care needs, which indicates when that individual patient may be in need of more timely care in a more efficient way. So, it's putting the information on a plane of glass that's very specific to care to that particular patient at that moment in time. So, in simple world is tailing their information to what that individual needs at that moment in time and pushing away all the details you don't need to see, that usually confuses things, and ultimately will slow down care. So that's in labor and delivery. And this is our Mural system. The other one is virtual ICU. In the intensive care unit, we've created a product within the ICU that allows for virtual viewing of what's happening in the actual ICU to provide additional care that's not on site in the ICU department itself, again, providing more tailored information for the clinicians to provide more specific care for those patients that are in the ICU.

So again, it's all about how do you tailor the information, improve the workflows, improve the experience of the clinicians, and ultimately improve the patient outcomes. The third plug I'd made would be for the digital CMU, which is our Digital Central Monitoring Unit. You'll hear from Neal Sandy later today, who runs our Patient Monitoring business. This is a very cool product that is allowing for virtual surveillance of those patients that are on telemetry. Some telemetry units around the United States that could be dozens, if not hundreds of patients being monitored for cardiac telemetry at one particular time. So, it's very difficult for individual clinicians to react to the alarms and react to the needs of individuals within that floor. So Digital Central Monitoring Unit is an off-site solution that is, again, another surveillance type tool that individual clinicians are off-site monitoring those patients that have the most acute variances and anomalies relative to what they're being monitored on that directs the care to the patient in the most specific specified way. So, it's augmenting the clinicians that are on site and providing a more tailored view of managing alarms and managing those patients who are in the greatest need of care versus just trying to deal with all of it when you're on site.

We're extremely excited of where we can go with using the information, again, from the millions of units that we have in the world today that are producing this information, that have served us really in our patients and customers for decades on that one-to-one care. How do you use this information at scale? And historically, we haven't. Most of the patient monitoring information and other data within our portfolio is there at the point in time and then it disappears. So, some work that Roshy is doing and the rest of the team to better use this information, its use at scale, is ultimately the next chapter in the Patient Care Solutions journey that will really drive improvements and help our customers and ultimately with patient care.

Matt Smith: Terrific overview. It really provides a great summary for some of our most dynamic products right now and solutions. I want to move over to probably one of the hotter topics this year, that is longitudinal care. Turning data into insights with the typical acute care setting is one challenge. However, we hear from hospitals and health systems that more and more care extends outside the four walls of the hospital. This is happening partly out of necessity, but also to help patients receive care back where they want to be, which is at home. How do you account for this trend and the vast amount of patients who are migrating out of the hospital?

Tom Westrick: I think that the pandemic accelerated everyone's thinking on this topic where there was just literally a global need to provide care wherever you possibly can. And as I said earlier, our mission is to follow the patient and provide care wherever that care is needed versus focusing on an area of a particular health hospital system. It's ubiquitous, it's through the entire journey of a patient has in providing care. The idea of remote patient monitoring outside of the home, outside the hospital monitoring has been gaining a tremendous amount of steam in the last three to four years.  And it's an obvious thought of how do I given what I mentioned earlier on the clinician shortages, massive demand on the care settings, in the in hospital environment, even in ambulatory care, like how do we provide care to a patient in the most efficient way, just in general? But it's a challenge. You can go back to the comment we made earlier about data. You just can't put more people at home on monitoring and sending more information to be looked at from the providers, that doesn't work either. So how do you tie all this together in a way that allows for the specified care to be provided to those who are monitored outside of a traditional hospital setting or inpatient setting? And how do you provide that information back to the providers that they can act in a more specified way? That's a critical, again, obvious thing to say, but more information is not the answer. How do you provide the more specified information?

Now, one of the areas that we've done, we're starting to extend into the non-traditional hospital sense, is our partnership with AliveCor, which is a consumer-based EKG monitoring device that consumers will use. It's an approved, FDA cleared, six-lead device, very easy to administer EKG. It's about the size of a pack of gum. And we've connected that to our long-standing MUSE software system, which in-house hospitals have been used for decades to track and monitor and manage EKGs that are taken in house. So, again, it's a workflow type solution that allows for patients to be monitored from an EKG perspective outside the traditional home, outside the traditional hospital, and use that information in a tailored way back to those who are using the immune system historically. I think the long story short is we got to be careful. How do you provide that tailored solution remotely that doesn't just dump more information on already stressed provider environments?

Matt Smith: Definitely exciting times for meeting the needs for longitudinal care. So, Tom and Roshy, thank you both for walking us through the Patient Care Solution vision and data utilization. Any closing thoughts? Anything you'd like to add as we close out the conversation today?

Tom Westrick:  I would just say thanks to the entire GE HealthCare and Patient Care Solutions team, we have an awesome group of people here today and in our teams, and we're super excited about the GE HealthCare spin that took place earlier this year. We're a growth company, we're an innovative company. We are attacking our most significant unmet needs of our customers in a way that's different, in a way of how do we allow for success of those who are using our equipment versus, here's our equipment out, you manage how to use it. And I think that's probably been the theory of medical devices for a long time, and not just us. So how do we tailor all of our equipment to solutions that provide for meeting head on the needs of our customer base in a really challenging environment today, where demands are at an all-time high? So thanks for the team. Looking forward to the next couple days at HIMSS here, where we get to showcase all the great stuff we're doing.

Matt Smith: Absolutely. Thanks, Tom. Thanks, Roshy. Tom Westrick, Roshy Francis, everyone.

Tom Westrick: Thanks, Matt.

Matt Smith: All right, thank you.