Interview with Neil Boyce, Country Manager of GE Healthcare.

By Colin Chinery

A “deadly divide”, a healthcare system “not working…going in the wrong direction…worse than existed during apartheid.” These were the words of Health Minister Dr Aaron Motsoaledi, addressing the Board of Healthcare Funders' (BHF) conference at Sun City in July, where pricing, affordability and sustainability were all in the spotlight.

The solution, he says, pledging to meet “head on” a public health system “in a crisis of quality”, lies in re-engineering the country's primary healthcare system. And during the conference, Dr Motsoaledi announced a three streams plan of care with particular focus on rural areas and the provision of specialists in each of the rural district municipalities.

Both plan and analysis strike a chord with Neil Boyce, Country Manager of GE Healthcare South Africa.

“My vision for healthcare is that we do the basics right. For example up until a few years ago South Africa was not getting the basics right with regards to HIV. South Africa is now the biggest anti retroviral market in the world,” Boyce, appointed last year to play a leading role in driving GE Healthcare’s organic growth in South Africa, tells South Africa Magazine.

“In rural areas people are still dying from malaria, from TB and other basic diseases that can be treated or cured. Here at GE we will be looking increasingly at diagnostic solutions and basic health care needs. South Africa must reduce mortality rates and ensure no one is lost to basic illnesses.”

From his Johannesburg headquarters Boyce is responsible for developing and expanding customer relationships in South Africa and beyond, as well as implementing a delivery transforming strategy around long-term public and private sector partnerships.

“Our product offerings are developing a rather more rural and basic focus. The Government doesn’t want to buy only high-end; they want us to offer a full solution covering all segments and sectors of the market. In the past we’ve had one size fits all scenarios, selling top end equipment and service at a premium price and not catering for this bigger picture.

“This is changing, addressing the South African situation where up to eight million people have health care insurance and the Government looks after the rest – 42 million. The National Health Insurance model recently announced -- to be phased in over 14 years according to Dr Motsoaledi -- has looked at best practice worldwide and tried to find the best out of each. The Government wants to bring more people into the net, work on basic health care and bring down basic statistics such as infant mortality, and we are perfectly placed to play a leading role.”

GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care, and is a leading maker of diagnostic imaging equipment including MRI, ultrasound, and computed tomography (CT) scanners.

With expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, drug discovery, biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies, performance improvement and solutions services, GE Healthcare is helping its customers deliver better care to more people around the world at a lower cost. It is also partnering with healthcare leaders to implement a shift to sustainable healthcare systems.

“The South African market for GE Healthcare is witnessing a dramatic growth and we have already identified a clear market strategy,” says Boyce, who has an extensive background within the healthcare industry in various roles including sales at Johnson & Johnson, and 10 years at Tyco Healthcare as Sales & Marketing Director for the surgical, medical and imaging business.

One of the company’s priorities is the training of health-service suppliers, and Boyce expects GE Healthcare to play an integral role in supporting primary health services through mobile hospital units.

“This year we plan to start schooling five hundred people in partnership with training institutions. We will offer specific training courses for the likes of hospital managers and technicians. Training is one of the foundations of our business. We have a lot of in house training and skills development, getting our staff to the next level, uplifting and enabling previously disadvantaged people and companies.”

On-going training across modalities within GE Healthcare is accelerating. “It’s been exciting but very difficult to hone the training programmes from the high-end perspective of Europe and the United States to that of South Africa where we are trying to do the basics right first and then expand to the next level. In parallel we will continue to bring to the local market relevant innovative technologies. But as we say at GE, it’s not innovation for innovation's sake; it’s about innovation that successfully targets our customers and their patients’ needs.”

But the big test in training is funding and cost. “It’s very expensive. South Africa is a vast country with a huge turnover of people coming, people going, and it’s challenging.”

At the forefront of GE’s commitment to sustainable and cost-effective healthcare globally and here in South Africa is ‘Healthymagination’, a programme with over 100 innovations all focused on addressing three critical needs: lowering costs, touching more lives and improving quality.

Specifically, it is geared to:
• Significantly reduce the cost of procedures and processes where possible with GE technology and services.
• Increase access to services, technologies and health education.
• Greatly improve quality of care for patients by partnering with physicians and other stakeholders to focus on innovation that simplify and refine healthcare procedures and accelerate standards of care.

“Healthymagination is a GE pillar, a big driver, reducing the cost and getting more people into affordable health,” says Boyce. “The recent commercial launch of GE Healthcare’s Vscan - a pocket-sized ultra sound visualisation tool - in South Africa is in line with the Healthymagination initiative, another clear reflection of its mission focusing on bringing high quality healthcare at lower costs to more people. It can potentially help in reducing the time needed for diagnosis as well as reducing patient wait times and improving physician workflow. We are continuously developing innovations focused on reducing costs, increasing access and improving quality and efficiency.”

Rising costs is a hot issue in South African healthcare, and the biggest concern for employers, brokers and medical schemes within the healthcare industry according to findings from the 2010 OMAC Actuaries & Consultants Healthcare Survey. Medical schemes are still struggling to contain these costs, while at the same time members perceive the benefits to be decreasing, says the study.

Boyce concurs and says as well as having top end equipment, GE Healthcare is looking towards the more reasonably priced middle to top end products tailored for the emerging market. “GE is a vast company and has a lot of resource and financial muscle. We’ve looked at our product offering, the way we go to market, and the smarter and more productive options. We have a lot of expertise in giving hospitals models to work from the back door to the front and we are driving this expertise home. We aim to make hospitals more productive for the benefit both of the patient and the funding Government.

“At present the infrastructure isn’t geared to accommodate the growth, both from the hospital building and specialist provision perspectives. GE has had a look at this, and when it comes to training and education we are one of the market leaders. We have a fantastic model to accommodate this and train end users, be they radiologists, cardiologists, doctors, sisters, midwives and other disciplines.”

With hospitals projects development, a core competency, GE Healthcare South Africa has a designated team working with architects, EPC contractors and Investors, where we are looking at opportunities to design and provide integrated equipping solutions for new Greenfield site hospitals. “This is another area where we can add expertise, and we have another very experienced team specialising in the Public and Private Partnership (PPP) model and a very strong consortium looking at the road forward. In this consortium, we are the Medical Technology Partner and will handle the complete Medical Equipping solution. The Government has announced five or six PPPs and we must be able to compete and get into this market and add value to accommodate the National Health Care model. Altogether I believe we can provide a comprehensive solution to the healthcare market.

“Yes we are an American Group, but effectively a South African company with American back up looking at South African and African challenges and opportunities. For us to be successful we need to find a localised African solution for African challenges, using the skills, tool box and vast resources that GE has.”

Image: Getty