GE Healthcare Announces The Addition Of Liz Blackwood To Quality Leadership Team

Main Category: Pharma Industry / Biotech Industry
Article Date: 21 Nov 2007 - 3:00 PST

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GE Healthcare announced that industry expert Liz Blackwood has joined the GE Healthcare Quality team as Senior Vice President, Global Quality Assurance. Blackwood brings nearly 20 years of experience driving product and process quality improvements within the medical device industry to GE.

"Liz has proven global leadership capabilities and a deep domain experience developing process quality improvements," said Dee Mellor, Chief Quality Officer, GE Healthcare. "Her knowledge and guidance will be essential for ensuring consistent, compliant processes throughout our global manufacturing sites, particularly as we continue to develop novel technologies that fulfill GE's vision for Early Health."

Blackwood will continue to architect GE Healthcare's Quality Management System (QMS) and be responsible for operationalizing all elements across the business. She will partner with GE's Regulatory Affairs team to ensure integration and monitoring of regulatory requirements into business practices as well as facilitate a more proactive growth strategy.

Prior to joining GE, Blackwood served as Worldwide Vice President of Quality and Compliance for Johnson & Johnson's Ethicon-Endosurgery division and then Worldwide Vice President, Quality, Regulatory and Medical Affairs at Johnson & Johnson's LifeScan division. While at Johnson & Johnson ($20B medical device and diagnostics company), Blackwood developed and implemented Centers of Excellence for Quality Engineering and Reliability, achieved ISO 13485 certification for all global sites and had no FDA regulatory findings leading to the resolution of three FDA Warning Letters. Her initiatives also led to significant reductions in customer complaints and field actions. Before joining Johnson & Johnson, Blackwood was Quality Assurance Director at Boston Scientific, an $8B global medical device company, where she harmonized major quality systems for her division and directed quality activities for numerous manufacturing segments.

Blackwood holds a M.S. in Management from Lesley College, a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from University of Lowell and an A.S. in Manufacturing Technology from Keene State College.

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.

http://www.gehealthcare.com

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