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| Innovative Ultrasound Technology: Taking Forward the Early Health Vision |
| Tuesday, 04 March 2008 | |||
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“Year 2007 for GE Healthcare has been outstanding and we achieved double digit growth. There were many segments which did exceedingly well like the Premium Ultrasound segment—Voluson series, Vivid 7, and the newly introduced Compact Ultrasound segment had fuelled terrific growth,” says Priya Joshi
What is the vision of GE Healthcare Ultrasound? Please elaborate on the Early Health model. Would you like to tell us about your Compact Ultrasound strategy?
By working with physicians from a wide range of medical specialties, we’ve learned that image quality, portability, and clinical specialization are all essential for expanding ultrasound’s role in healthcare. We’ve developed our new Compact Series to address these needs and bring the benefits of ultrasound to virtually all clinicians and patients—creating a pathway for ultrasound to become as ubiquitous in patient care as the stethoscope is today. What is the total installation base of ultrasound equipment in the country till date? What is your share?
The total installed base of ultrasound systems in India is estimated to be between 40,000-50,000 systems. This includes systems for radiology, cardiology, and shared systems installed in various hospitals and private clinics. Every year there is a survey done by Frost & Sullivan, and GE ultrasound has been rated to have around 52 percent market share for the last three years, which is the highest in India. What are the main product features and other factors, which a buyer of ultrasound equipment generally looks at? Users across the range of products look for good image quality and a simple and easy to use interface. In the high-end, volume imaging is becoming a very essential tool to provide clinical diagnosis, and with all the features like VCAD (Automated Fetal Echo Study), VCI (Coronal Imaging), and Vocal (Automated Volume Calculation)—which may help acquire and analyze the volume data easily and with an efficient workflow—it is fast becoming the choice of the user. Kindly comment on the emerging trends and new technologies in the ultrasound equipment market in India vis-à-vis the global market. We see the utility of ultrasound applications in the emerging segments like anesthesiology, breast imaging, oncology applications, vascular imaging, orthopedics, etc. Ultrasound is used for all these applications in developed countries for some time now. India is fast catching up and a good dose of education, awareness, and availability of technology will help. What is Compact Ultrasound? Please elaborate on your initiatives for accelerating growth in this market segment. Good things come in small packages. GE’s Compact Series is a new and revolutionary line of ultrasound products that places the power and imaging capabilities of a high performance, 400-pound system into a laptop-size, 10 pound design today. It will get miniaturized further as the technology grows. GE, the world’s leading ultrasound company, has introduced clinically specialized portable ultrasound systems to address healthcare providers’ growing demand for sophisticated, real-time imaging at the point-of-care. Our vision of Early Health has helped us re-imagine the technology so that it can travel to the patient rather than the patient traveling to technology site. More and more people can benefit from this technology and more and more lives can be saved. The compact ultrasound systems from GE provide the same high end qualities of premium ultrasound systems from GE. The compact systems can help in some of the emerging new applications like emergency trauma, ambulances, intensive care, operating theatres, etc. Apart from shared services and traditional applications, GE Compact Ultrasound is designed to support real-time clinical decisions in anesthesiology, emergency care, women’s health, critical care, ambulatory care, transplants, etc. Would you kindly elaborate on the Compact Ultrasound products range? GE Healthcare has achieved No. 1 market share in compact ultrasound worldwide in 2006 and in 2007 with the widest range of products that are suitable for a variety of new applications. LOGIQ Book XP Enhanced: LOGIQ Book XP Enhanced provides you the next generation performance in a compact platform – exactly what you’d expect from the world leader in Ultrasound. LOGIQ Book XP Enhanced’s advanced platform, features expanded applications, higher performance, increased productivity, lots of freedom, and is designed to provide new levels of clinical value and productivity for the most demanding healthcare environments. LOGIQ e: The LOGIQ e is a high performance shared service color doppler compact imaging system designed to address widest applications from radiology, cardiology, obstetrics, gynecology, vascular, and small parts imaging. The new LOGIQ e was uniquely designed with the speed requirements and imaging applications to support real-time clinical decisions in all clinical settings. Its key features include:
What growth prospects are projected for the market in the next three years?
While corporate growth will fuel the premium equipment sale, expansion of healthcare in the rural and class B towns will accelerate the value products growth. What are the challenges and opportunities faced by the ultra-sound equipment manufacturers in India? One of the biggest challenges before ultrasound manufacturers in India is to design a product for Rural India and to maximize the reach through various channels. The biggest decision making factor in this segment is the cost of the equipment. Since GE Healthcare has a manufacturing site in Bangalore for the portable hand-held black and white ultrasound system–LOGIQ 100 Pro, we are striving to reach the needy population in the rural segment. Anything else you would like to tell us? GE Healthcare takes the total ownership and believes that education is very important, and it plays a major role in updating the latest information on the current applications. GE Healthcare ensures that almost every year there is an international speaker invited on specialized applications, and a seminar is conducted to share the information. GE also conducts specialized 3D/4D ultrasound training, color doppler training, and musculoskeletal training programs. GE Healthcare does not support the use of ultrasound technology for fetal sex determination. We condemn misuse of a life saving technology like ultrasound.
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