GE Healthcare: Medical tech developers and coworking
GE Healthcare Group is the latest multinational company to promote the benefits of using coworking spaces rather than traditional offices. Founded in 1893, the company is one of the world’s most well-respected medical technology developers.
A leading healthcare diagnostics innovator, the company operates a laboratory for life science start-ups at Alderley Park in Cheshire, preferring the coworking laboratories and collaborative research environment to a corporate workplace.
A subsidiary of US multinational conglomerate General Electric, which boasts an annual revenue of £17.3 billion, GE Healthcare has its global headquarters in Chicago. The company operates in 160 countries around the world.
It has been moving increasingly towards coworking spaces in recent years, having realised the huge benefits they offer. According to management, using coworking space helps employees to “meet and collaborate with professionals of diverse perspectives”. By “embracing the networking opportunities”, the UK team is “moving towards building a healthier world”.
The company specialises in providing solutions for health care administrators and clinicians, innovative medical equipment and technology for drug discoveries and biopharmaceuticals. It employs around 8,500 people in the UK, with offices at Hatfield, Chalfont St Giles, Amersham and Belfast.
Coworking facility
The coworking facility at Alderley Park is helping small and medium-sized enterprises to accelerate their science research by accessing services, training and advanced technologies from GE Healthcare: providing facilities for multiple research projects including advanced protein and cell analysis technology; ÄKTA systems to purify protein; Biacore 8K, used in the discovery of new drugs; and the IN Cell Analyser 6500HS, used for cellular imaging.
Both GE Healthcare and the resident small and medium businesses can gain valuable insights into the challenges faced by SMEs in the medical and healthcare sector. Coworking also presents opportunities for them to collaborate on solutions to benefit the UK’s life sciences sector.
What are their goals and objectives?
The company’s mission statement is to create a healthier world by “unlocking opportunities” for the medical and healthcare sector and their patients. GE Healthcare’s goal is to provide innovative technology to help clinicians make more informed and faster decisions, which is made possible by using data analytics, intelligent devices, applications and services that are supported by GE Healthcare.
The UK’s biotechnology industry is growing rapidly, with more than 5,800 life science companies across the nation employing almost 250,000 people. The top 25 global bioscience companies, including GE Healthcare, all have operations in the UK.
Utilising coworking space is a further step forward in changing working practices into a collaborative environment, where networking aids the company to achieve its goals. The facility is helping to accelerate small and medium enterprises’ research and discovery goals.
What has GE Healthcare achieved so far?
More than 300,000 patients are supported each day by the use of GE Healthcare’s imaging agents, while the company provides around four million imaging, mobile, monitoring and diagnostic devices worldwide. More than two billion patient scans are managed every year across the world by technology managed by GE Healthcare.
The company prides itself on working in a sustainable manner in all it does including environmental stewardship, safety procedures, human rights and investments in local communities. Despite the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, it has used this period as an opportunity to modernise and improve existing healthcare ecosystems, accelerating progress to adapt to future health provisions worldwide.
In August, GE Healthcare announced its latest project, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services, to offer intelligent productivity tools to UK radiologists. Birmingham’s Royal Orthopaedic Hospital NHS Foundation Trust will be the first in Europe to benefit from cloud deployment using GE’s Edison True PACS.
The project will provide intelligent productivity tools for radiologists to reduce errors, increase reading speed, improve diagnostic precision and provide more confident diagnoses. With radiologists under increased pressure, due to long waiting lists after the pandemic, this increased speed and efficiency is vital to help reduce backlogs.
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