Made in India! GE's low-cost medical devices

GE Healthcare on Thursday unveiled two advanced cardiac care solutions, designed and developed in India, with the aim to help provide better, affordable early cardiac diagnosis for more people.

These innovations -- GE MAC 600 ECG and GE VIVID P3 ultrasound system -- reinforce GE's 'healthymagination' commitment to offer better healthcare for more people in India and around the world at affordable costs, the company said in a statement.

Healthcare providers around the world are facing a myriad of changes including the rise of unprecedented chronic disease, aging populations, and escalating costs.

Heart diseases have emerged as the number one killer in both urban and rural areas of India.

About 25 per cent of deaths in the age group of 25-69 years and 19 per cent in all age groups occur because of heart diseases.

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Cardiovascular disease in India has quadrupled in the last 40 years and WHO estimates that by 2020, close to 60 percent of cardiac patients worldwide will be from India with probability of heart attack six years earlier than people anywhere else.

This unfair burden is especially harsh on rural population with loss of healthy, working days and rising cost of healthcare estimated to be between 12-14 per cent annually, over the last decade according to National Commission on Macroeconomics and health.

Providing quality healthcare to patient populations spread across vast remote or rural areas is a daunting challenge with limited availability of trained manpower, rising healthcare costs and/or limited facilities for early detection and treatment of disease.

The new GE MAC 600 is a lightweight, portable, easy to use digital resting ECG device that puts leading clinical technology simplified and resized to fit the hands of a physician in small towns and rural areas, the company said.

It is designed to save time, energy and paper. The ECG results are presented in colour on-screen with options to save the results in standard adobe acrobat files in detachable SD memory cards.

With MAC 600, physicians have the option of printing the only selected files and storing the files digitally as well as transfer of the results using removable SD card and mobile phones for expert opinions or base hospitals/clinics.

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GE's MAC 600 is available at Rs 60,000-75,000, 80 per cent lower than similar quality, FDA cleared ECG solutions that are being imported currently.

GE VIVID P3 is a dedicated cardiac imaging ultrasound system developed in India for this country and the world to bridge the affordability gap in this speciality care area.

The new GE VIVID P3 is available at 50 per cent lower cost, at Rs 11-12 lakh as compared to FDA cleared, imported similar quality products priced above Rs 20 lakh, the company added.

GE Healthcare's 'In India, for India' strategy came into effect in 2007. It has rolled out 11 solutions developed in India till date.