Mexico Ready to Shift to Digital

Q: Mexico must shift to preventive medicine, which is GE’s main focus. What are you doing to guarantee patients access to it?

A: Prevention is fundamental to us and the public sector should be spending on this. Expenditure will never be enough but this only requires us to be more effective and find a way to optimize the value of our offer. Our portfolio is focused on diagnosis and includes different modalities: magnetic resonance, computed tomography, ultrasound, mammography, x-ray, life-care solutions, life sciences and the information systems that support this. Our strategy is focused on diagnosis and there are three pillars for us: first, we aim to provide accessible costs and quality by creating products affordable for each country to reach coverage; second, we work on the client-provider relationship, we never work alone and we always need the support and confidence of our partners and third, we support PPPs, which will help us reach more patients.

Q: Last year you mentioned that projects for GE will be focused on the digital realm. What advances have been made in the shift to digital?

A: The main leaders of the company and business areas are committed to transforming GE into a digital industrial company. GE Store is our name for the company’s competitive advantage. There is no other company that has the ability to transfer intellect and technology across industries and around the world as GE can; from advanced technology, materials, software and analytics, to commercialization, process, and business model best practices. We also have our own operative system for the industrial internet, Predix, that is transversal for all GE businesses, including healthcare. The platform enables us to manage the information we gather over the years and make it available to our clients. By connecting industrial equipment, analyzing data and delivering real-time insights, Predix-based apps are unleashing new levels of performance. We are in an era of change and GE is planning on leading that change. We used to talk about IT, now we talk about operation technology, a step further than IT because it is the way to understand how to manage information for a determined operation.

Q: What benefits could GE digitalization bring to the healthcare system?

A: We try to bring more efficiency and productivity to our portfolio through our new platform. The value of our digital proposition is focused on service provision and control and maintenance of our clients’ assets. For example, GE Health Cloud is a product designed to integrate clinical workflows while managing the volume, velocity and variety of healthcare data. It will be capable of connecting to more than 500,000 GE medical imaging machines and more than 1.5 million imaging machines worldwide, linking to millions of other healthcare devices including patient monitoring, diagnostics, anesthesia delivery, ultrasound, mammography and various data sources. The future is not about having an application in a machine, it is about getting the information produced by the machine in a cloud and working with it. We have launched the application of Predix internationally, while in Mexico and Latin America we are taking the first steps in healthcare. GE’s main engineering IQ research center is in Queretaro with a multidisciplinary team for healthcare development. The platform has been developed under standards that address GE policies and each country’s regulations.

Q: What are your main objectives in Mexico for the coming years?

A: There are three main targets for the next three years. First, we want to be acting and delivering as a digital healthcare company. Then, we want to ensure profitability for our shareholders through healthy growth. Next, we want to make GE Healthcare Mexico an opportunity for talent. We want the best people for a better understanding and performance. These three objectives meet because if we are profitable, we can focus on innovation and think about developing talent. Talent leads to a better development, which leads to possibility for innovation. There is a lot of talent in Mexico and we need to attract it to our company.