GE to digitize small, private healthcare units

NEW DELHI, INDIA: GE Healthcare, today announced that it has unveiled a new designed "In India, for India" IT solution - GE Centricity PACS Reach, a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) aimed at affordably digitizing India's 15,000-plus small diagnostic centers and hospitals.

Currently the market is traditionally lower in clinical image volume but is growing at a tremendous pace in India’s Tier-II and Tier-III cities. Centricity PACS Reach endeavors to bring the market faster image access, greater efficiency and lower operational costs, said a press release.

The solution is compact, web-deployable, image processing, distribution and reporting solution that can be used from within and outside a healthcare facility. It enables a complete film-less operation delivering powerful, global standards-based and secure DICOM storage with image distribution any time, anywhere. It has a fully integrated feature set of image viewing capabilities, seamless navigation, express reporting and teleradiology support ideally suited for customers in Tier-II and Tier-III cities

Centricity PACS Reach has immense potential to expedite healthcare IT adoption in India and other emerging countries, the release added.

It’s widely accepted that IT adoption in the Indian healthcare segment has been slow and only a handful of Indian hospitals or diagnostic centers are IT-enabled today due to the relative high cost of imported IT solutions.

"IT delivers information to the heart of healthcare institutions and to the fingertips of providers and patients seamlessly, anywhere, anytime,” said Vishal Wanchoo, president and CEO of GE Healthcare IT.

He further said, “We’re not strangers here. We understand the challenges Indian healthcare is facing between disparate clinics, sparse information sharing, bandwidth challenges and the paperwork barrier.  We are committed to begin changing this through solutions that we will develop in India, for India, to help expand healthcare’s reach to more people. "

Centricity PACS Reach is priced at Rs.5 Lakhs per unit compared to imported systems that are available upwards of Rs.50 Lakhs to Rs. 10 Crores with many features that may be required only for advanced clinical usage and scale to support high patient procedure volumes.  

It is designed and developed at GE’s John F Welch Global Research Centre, Bangalore, specifically to meet India's unique value requirements.