GE Healthcare Lunar Services Retains Number 1 MD Buyline Ranking - Satisfaction Survey On Bone Densitometry Equipment And Service

Main Category: Bones / Orthopaedics
Also Included In: Medical Devices / Diagnostics
Article Date: 26 Sep 2008 - 1:00 PDT

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GE Healthcare Lunar continues its strong record of continuously improving the customer experience and once again earned the top spot in MD Buyline's 2nd quarter 2008 customer satisfaction survey on bone densitometry equipment and service. GE Healthcare received top marks in four of six categories - system performance, installation and implementation, applications training and service response time - and tied for top marks in a fifth category, service repair quality.

"Earning MD Buyline's top overall rating for the third straight quarter results from listening to and responding to our customers," said David Schlack, General Manager of GE Healthcare Lunar Services. "That's the culture of our organization: we are always seeking to provide our customers with service that exceeds their expectations. We believe bone mineral densitometry customers especially value our ability to remotely and rapidly resolve their problems."

Bone mineral densitometry (BMD) enables physicians to measure bone mineral density in patients and allows medical practitioners to simultaneously assess body composition and determine fat distribution in adults. This x-ray technology, called Dual-Energy Absorbtiometry or DXA (or DEXA) scanning, measures and calculates bone, fat and muscle mass. Other GE Healthcare Lunar technology uses quantitative ultrasound to measure the heel to assess fracture risk.

Remote service troubleshoots practice management issue "A key GE Healthcare Services feature that has been a customer delighter," Schlack said, "is GE's InSite ExC, which links GE Healthcare BMD systems with an online support center in Madison, Wisconsin. With InSite ExC, remote system diagnosis and problem resolution are possible in as little as 15 minutes almost 87% of the time."

The customers' ability to reach out to the support center for any application or technical needs - and have InSite ExC available to provide an instant, permission-based connection with the customers' BMD systems - has been indispensable, he added. Livingston County Orthopedics in Howell, Michigan, for example, had been struggling with how to conduct practice management tactics, such as reminding patients of follow-up visits. Though their GE Lunar system was equipped with a software application that can easily track and generate patient mailings for follow-up visits, they were unsure how to optimize the feature.

"I was absolutely thrilled to learn that InSite ExC existed, because I'm not a very technical person and having this feature made it easier for me to do my job," observed Jacki Ribianszky, RTR, X-Ray Technician at Livingston County Orthopedics. "I just sat back and everything was done for me remotely; it was a very good process. The GE On-Line Engineer did everything in only 45 minutes. He even printed the finished product for me.

"We were completely satisfied with the experience," Ribianszky added. "We don't have a telephone in that room, so it would have been difficult to facilitate without InSite ExC. If he had been instructing me to do it step-by-step, it would have taken at least twice as long. InSite ExC was absolutely a lifeline for us. I was intimidated by it at first, but this helped us overcome the technical hurdle and become much more at ease with the system."

Schlack commented that efforts to enhance GE Healthcare Services help customers such as Ribianszky deliver better service at the point of care. "As we continue to listen to our customers and investment in our customer support personnel, support technology and best-practice service processes, we believe our strong ratings trend will continue," he says.

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.

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