General Electric Co.'s $6 billion global health initiative, "healthymagination," turned one-year old this week, the company announced.

So far, the Fairfield, Conn.-based multinational has pumped $700 million in R&D and $250 million in an equity fund to nurture innovative health care technology start-ups.

Fruits of what the company claims is the largest consumer campaign in its 91-year history include a "budget" MRI machine for developing markets; an ambitious wellness program to lower internal health costs; and a plan carried out at a busy urban hospital in New York to make sustainable a nearly full occupancy rate.

ACCESSIBLE HIGH-TECH

Part of GE's "healthymagination" goal was to make high-tech medical equipment more accessible to developing countries. This led to the design of a relatively low-priced MRI scanner, the Brivo MR, a 1.5 Tesla machine which debuted earlier this year.

"The system has a 15 percent lower total cost of ownership when compared to performing equipment in the 1.5 T space," Jason Deeken, a marketing manager at GE, told DOTmed News.

Still, it's not exactly cheap, and goes for under a million dollars, Deeken said. But more savings would come from simplification: GE expanded the ability to remotely maintain the machine by electronically linking it to central servers to troubleshoot imaging problems, something critical for devices installed in hard-to-reach rural areas. And it's also easier to use than comparable systems, Deeken said. It features the "Ready Bar," which allows users to toggle scan resolution with only one, sliding control, which means operators need less training.

"Before this system, the only way to control that was to manipulate all 30 scan parameters," Deeken explained. "This single control makes that basic trade-off a lot easier."

China is one of the main markets for the product, but so far it has been most successful in India, Deeken said. Around 30 units have been ordered so far, he said, ahead of the first shipments later this summer.

INTERNAL HEALTH COSTS

Launched in October, GE's wellness plan, HealthAhead, aims to curb the ferocious growth of the company's employee health care costs: $3 billion in 2009 in the U.S. alone, according to the company. The program tries to encourage better living by subsidizing healthy meals at campus canteens, providing low-cost access to fitness centers and promoting smoking cessation.

So far, three of GE's 500 campuses, including one in Hyerdabad, India, and another in Cardiff, Wales, are fully certified for the program, with 10 more in the queue.

"Nowhere else, at least that we are aware of, is there a company of our size and scope with a comprehensive system of eight elements to measure and reward a healthy workplace," GE's chief medical officer Dr. Robert Galvin told DOTmed News in a prepared statement.

"AIR-TRAFFIC CONTROL" IN THE HOSPITAL

Possibly one of the most advanced aspects of the plan, what one GE executive called the "real Star Wars cutting-edge stuff," uses air-traffic control software to manage patient loads at a busy city hospital.

Mount Sinai Medical Center, a research hospital in Manhattan, is usually slammed: it routinely operates at around 95 percent capacity, sometimes at more than 100 percent during the flu season, GE said. But the literature on occupancy generally holds it to be sustainable only if it stays at around 85 percent, Jeff Terry, managing principal of GE Healthcare's performance solutions, told DOTmed.

"We're seeking to redefine the redline," Terry said. "If we do that, it's a big deal for patients, it's a big deal for hospitals."

To sustainably manage nearly full occupancy rates, GE has put in a "smart" patient-handling system that actually predicts the state of the hospital hours and eventually, possibly, a day into the future.

To do this at Mount Sinai, where GE first began setting up the project about 18 months ago, the company has put in AgileTrac, air-traffic control software. This works in coordination with RFID tags inserted into wristbands that every patient at the hospital wears, allowing the hospital to track in real-time the location of everyone on the floor.

But underlying it all is an experimental tool, a simulation model, running probabilistic algorithms, developed at the GE Global Research Center outside of Albany, N.Y.

Using this, the system can tell nurses when they can expect beds to be free to allow them to efficiently use space. GE said Mount Sinai has been able to treat an additional 10,000 patients a year with the same number of beds and employees, thanks in part to the system.

Currently, it can accurately predict the state of the hospital eight hours into the future, Terry said, about the length of a nurse's shift.

"Now, we're trying to push the envelope to 16 and 24 hours," he said.

GE is also setting up the system in the Virtua Health System in New Jersey, as well as the Ochshner Health System in New Orleans. A full commercial launch strategy could come about as early as next year, GE said.