John Flannery, GE Healthcare’s chief executive officer, told the Financial Times that when he started his job last year, he “didn’t come with a mandate to do big M&A.” Instead, Flannery, who held many different GE jobs during his 27 years with the company, said he would be focusing on organic growth. He’s taking advantage of GE’s digital industrial transformation and the GE Store, the idea of applying the knowledge from one GE business across other units to speed up innovation and product development.
GE Healthcare has been primarily known for its imaging machines like MRI and CT scanners. “There will always be a need for imaging — if anything it’s going to grow as we have more testing and diagnostics in an ageing population,” Flannery told the FT earlier this week. “But it’s important we don’t just remain a technology box company selling pixels.”
That’s why Flannery introduced the GE Health Cloud earlier this month at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), the medical imaging industry’s largest trade show. Built on GE’s cloud-based software platform, Predix, the health cloud is designed to be an ecosystem connecting software, hardware and medical devices. It will host data and also help doctors and clinicians collaborate and compare notes and insights as easily as using a social network. Read more about the GE Health Cloud here.