The GE Brief: January 15, 2021
Poland weathered the first wave of COVID-19 relatively well. But like many other countries, it was hit hard by an autumn wave. In November, soaring infections pushed the country’s healthcare system to the limits and reinforcements were needed. And reinforcements arrived, in the form of more than a thousand GE Healthcare patient monitors, which use advanced software and can track everything from heart rate to blood oxygen. Still, the machines themselves are one thing; their installation onto hospital trolleys is quite another. “It’s normally an hourlong job for one person on one machine,” said Marcin Karp, a service director for North Eastern Europe at GE Healthcare, “but we had 1,300 machines.” Who could join the effort to install the machines? Karp and his colleagues had an idea.
Flying in tandem: Warsaw is known for its engineers, and many of them work at the Engineering Design Center, which was set up in 2000 by GE Aviation and the country’s prestigious Łukasiewicz Institute of Aviation. EDC’s research and development programs are not purely experimental, but directly connected to the industrial world. GE Healthcare outlined the patient monitor challenge to their EDC colleagues, and it wasn’t long before the needed reinforcements materialized. A total of 43 EDC workers volunteered to pitch in with the final configuration of the patient monitors, working from a COVID-19 secure workshop to mount the machines on trolleys and box them up. “It was a great example of synergy,” said Michal Woelke, a senior manager at GE Aviation. “We had engineers from different businesses coming together to share their ideas and work together to solve a problem.”
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Over the past year, GE Reports has spilled a lot of digital ink describing some of the company’s biggest achievements. But some ideas are so noteworthy that they benefit from a visual component too — say, the world’s most powerful commercial jet engine. Or the most powerful offshore wind turbine in operation. So we also created infographics to help our readers visualize what we’ve been reporting on. The list doesn’t include just those record-setting engines and towering turbines, but also GE’s efforts to use lean management to improve its operations, and technological achievements in medical imaging and health safety protocols in aviation. Click here to get the big picture(s).
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“We didn’t know how it was going to go but, in the end, the collaboration between the two GE businesses was seamless for hospitals to be able to receive the product, unwrap it and turn it on. That has been very, very warmly received. It shows how powerful a common goal can be.”
— Steve Smith, regional executive manager for Life Care Solutions at GE Healthcare in the U.K.
Quote: GE Reports. Images: GE Healthcare.