GE Healthcare is well-known in the industry but not everyone knows about GE Foundation, the philanthropic organization of GE. Dr. David Barash, chief medical officer and executive director of the global health portfolio at GE Foundation, spoke with DOTmed News about the biggest global health care issues and what the foundation is doing to try to combat them.

DOTmed: Can you tell me a little about the GE Foundation and what work you do?

DB: The GE Foundation was started about 90 years ago and was predominately focused on volunteerism and matching gifts. About 10 years ago, we began the Africa Project and the Foundation became much more programmatically focused.

Because we are a medical equipment manufacturer, our original idea was to attempt to have a positive impact through equipment donations to Africa. However, we quickly realized that just donating equipment or systems wouldn't make a significant difference.

We also realized early on that simply donating equipment may actually have an unintended negative impact, because unless you trained people to maintain and fix equipment in order to use it properly, it would wind up taking up valuable space and become a frustration to healthcare providers on the ground.

So, we began to develop programs that were much more geared towards capacity building and system strengthening. We now have a robust portfolio that trains health care workers in various disciplines, such as maintaining equipment or delivering anesthesia, enabling them to build or strengthen their health care system.

Over the last seven years, we have trained 200 biomedical technicians in seven countries. We've set up centers of excellence within schools in each of those countries; through "train the trainer" programs in Honduras and Rwanda there are now two self-sustaining schools.

Currently we are in the process of exiting those countries and allowing those programs run on a self-sustainable basis. We've also started this training program in Nigeria and are likely to launch it in other countries in Africa in the next few months.

Another significant part of Foundation programming both in the U.S. and globally is our employee engagement initiatives. GE has 300,000 employees globally, and we try to leverage our culture of volunteerism to have them participate in providing skill-based volunteering in many of our venues.

In the US, GE volunteers help teach grantees new systems and processes, and engage them in learning how to use new technology. We also use this opportunity to help them develop their leadership skills - something GE is known for globally. From a global perspective, we use skill-based volunteering to help establish relationships at the ministry and hospital level in developing nations.

DOTmed: What would you say are the biggest global health care issues right now?

DB: Communicable diseases still tend to be an issue, but obviously there is a lot more attention being paid to chronic diseases including hypertension, diabetes and cancer.

We're also focused on another set of issues around maternal and child health. There are still far too many mothers dying during birth, and children dying in the first few months to first five years of life unnecessarily. When you hear that 17,000 children die a day from mostly preventable causes that's a really hard thing to sit by and watch.

Another area that we're starting to focus on is safe surgery. Of the 800 women dying per day in developing countries during labor and delivery, most of those women can be saved if they had a safe surgical environment that can provide a C-section or treat maternal hemorrhage.

As part of our focus on safe surgery, we also have a program that trains nurses to deliver anesthesia independently. One of the biggest impediments to safe surgery in sub-Saharan Africa-also in all parts of the developing world-is a shortage of anesthesiologists.

DOTmed: Is the GE foundation doing anything to try to solve the shortage of primary care physicians in the U.S.?

DB: Even with the Affordable Care Act there will be 20 plus million people without insurance or access to primary care. We're working on new models to help improve systems and infrastructure to enable improvement in access to care.

We're leveraging what we know how to do and what we're good at doing, which is what we call our "GE DNA"-systems and processes, deployment of technology and leadership skills.

We've identified about 24 cities in the U.S. where we had more than 500 GE employees in the area who could volunteer at federally qualified health centers to improve systems, processes and leadership and in doing so, expand capacity for primary care to more patients in the local area.

The success we saw was anecdotal but really impressive-some clinics were able to increase their capacity to see patients by 20 percent and appointment scheduling times dropped in some clinics by as much as 70 percent.

From a clinical perspective, we saw rates for follow-up of appointments improving. In one clinic in Massachusetts, the staff was able to design a system that allows a patient with a behavioral health issue to see a behavioral health specialist or social worker after they visit with their primary care doctor.

We're about to pilot a program next year that will include medical technology to enable remote consultations. We think it has potential to transform many of the ways in which primary care is delivered in the U.S.

DOTmed: What has your foundation being doing to help with the Ebola crisis?

DB: We started looking at this back in August around the time of the African leader summit in Washington, D.C., which was probably the first time the world started paying a lot of attention to the outbreak.

In early September we issued a $2 million commitment to Partners in Health to help them, along with their partners, including Last Mile Health in Liberia, train staff to work in Ebola treatment units, as well as begin to do some of the system strengthening that needs to be done in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

GE makes a significant amount and wide variety of medical equipment and we're looking at what we can do from that standpoint to both help enable the direct response to Ebola, and also help rebuild the health systems in Liberia and Sierra Leone so that future Ebola crises don't occur.

For example, GE Water Systems is engaged because we have some water filtration systems that can be very impactful in this situation. We've also engaged GE Power to look what they might be able to do over the long-term to help facilitate building a power infrastructure. We're also leveraging the GE global software center to see if there are opportunities in terms of data analytics to aid in the long-term response.

There are multiple meetings taking place where the private sector is beginning to convene around Ebola, and we have taking on a leadership role in some of those meetings, to help bring the private sector together and facilitate an integrated response.

DOTmed: Are there any particular issues that your foundation is looking to focus more on in the future?

DB: One is how we can leverage technology to already expand upon what we've done to improve access to primary care. Another is taking the technology and the experience that we've had thus far and trying to focus it on safer surgery globally.