GE Healthcare Maternal-Infant Care Services Earns Top MD Buyline Marks For 3rd Straight Quarter

Main Category: Medical Devices / Diagnostics
Also Included In: Pediatrics / Children's Health;  Pregnancy / Obstetrics
Article Date: 25 Sep 2008 - 1:00 PDT

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GE Healthcare Maternal-Infant Care is at the top for the third consecutive quarter and is increasing its lead over its competitors in this equipment category, according to the MD Buyline survey for the 2nd quarter of 2008. MD Buyline maintains the largest online database on medical capital and informatics purchasing, discounting, user feedback, and vendor information.

Not only did GE Healthcare earn the top composite score for the third straight quarter, it also posted increases in five of six customer satisfaction categories and nearly eclipsed competitor scores in all categories, reflecting the market's approval of continuous improvements in GE Healthcare's Maternal-Infant Care services based on listening to customers and developing programs to meet their needs.

The six categories evaluated by the survey are system performance, system reliability, installation and implementation, applications training, service response time and service repair quality.

"To earn top honors in Maternal-Infant Care for the third consecutive quarter shows that we never rest on our laurels. We are always trying to improve to help our customers at their point of care," said Mike Battuello, General Manager of GE Healthcare's Life Systems Services. "We're certain that our ongoing success and improvement in this care area is a direct result of the intense focus on our customers. Our ability to hire, train and retain effective field service personnel also contributed to our success."

There have been several changes within the Maternal-Infant Care Services Team that contributed to the third straight top ranking:

- A new emphasis on the role of Customer Champion, offering an additional level of biomedical equipment technician (BMET) support. The Customer Champion is trained in advanced troubleshooting and has the full support of the product development and engineer teams. For that rare occasion when fast isn't fast enough, GE Healthcare's Customer Champion takes ownership of the issue and drives speed to resolution to help ensure the highest levels of customer satisfaction.

- Leveraging LEAN Principles in the Maternal-Infant Care On-Line Call Center have optimized staffing levels to better suit customer needs, increasing the speed to answer and resolve customer calls.

- New Segmented Global Parts Team translates into dedicated parts resources for the Maternal-Infant Care products. The result of this change has had an impact on the inventory process, enabling quicker parts fulfillment for BMETs.

- More training in more places. The Maternal-Infant Care Services team created multiple programs to satisfy both clinical and BMET training needs. Training programs are now available in more regional locations throughout the United States and also in a Webinar format when feasible.

"We continuously improve our service offerings based on customer feedback," Battuello observed. "As long as we pay attention to and respond to customer needs, we will be able to maintain these high marks."

About GE Healthcare

GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, performance improvement, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform, treat, and monitor disease, so patients can live their lives to the fullest.

GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases, and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection, and disease prevention. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $17- billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 46,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our Web site at http://www.gehealthcare.com.

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