WAUKESHA, WI - According to MD Buyline's 4th Quarter 2006 customer satisfaction survey, users of medical devices rank GE Healthcare #1 overall in radiology ultrasound, patient-monitoring, anesthesia, and fetal-monitoring - and give individual products in these categories high marks for qualities from overall system performance and reliability to service response time and repair quality.

"We are pleased to report that our customers ranked our Clinical Systems products and services #1 in a number of critical performance areas," said Hooman Hakami, GE Healthcare's Vice President and General Manager, Clinical Systems Services. "Our continuing investments in people, processes and infrastructure are paying dividends across the board."

GE Ultrasound leads in key performance category

The users MD Buyline surveyed ranked GE radiology and cardiology Ultrasound products #1 in several categories - including system performance.

"Our radiology products also received the top rankings in overall customer satisfaction, as well as installation, implementation and service response time," said Ann Marie Lubert, General Manager, GE Healthcare Americas Ultrasound Service Sales. "Our continued investments in skilled field engineers and new remote-assistance tools, combined with customer satisfaction programs. Together, they've enabled us to respond very quickly to customer needs."

GE Monitoring, Diagnostic Cardiology products excel

Various GE Monitoring and Diagnostic Cardiology products achieved top rankings in every MD Buyline performance category for the period, according to Rich Eng, General Manager, Monitoring Solutions and Diagnostic Cardiology.

"For overall system performance, our patient-monitoring, anesthesia and cardiac stress-testing systems were #1," Eng said. "And our patient-monitoring products were also #1 in installation, implementation, service response time and service repair quality."

Other GE products to be ranked first included anesthesia and electrocardiography systems for system reliability, and anesthesia systems for applications training.

Eng said that there are a number of reasons GE received such high marks in these areas, starting with a 30 percent increase in staff charged with direct customer service and significant response-time improvements in everything from Tech Support to Depot Repair. "We've also built into our system procedures designed to ensure customer satisfaction," he said, "including procedures for visiting customers proactively and following up with them after providing service."

GE Life Systems Services products also earn top rankings

Outstanding results were also reported for GE Life Systems Services products, said Mike Battuello, General Manager for this GE Healthcare business.

"I'm especially proud to report that our fetal monitoring products ranked #1 across the board," Battuello said. "For system performance, reliability, installation, implementation, applications training, service response time, and service repair quality."

Other devices from this business to earn the top spots included infant care products for system reliability, service response time and service repair quality.

"Customers tell us that speed, communication, and consistency are our keys to excellent service," Battuello added. "To meet these customer goals, we streamlined our internal processes in our Technical Support Center and Depot Repair operation."

Rankings are key benchmarks for continuous improvement

The reports of independent organizations such as MD Buyline, which compile data gathered from user-satisfaction surveys and interviews, are used by GE to identify areas needing improvement, according to Hakami.

"We look not only at our performance in the preceding quarter, but also at our overall trending, in isolation as well as against industry trends," said Hakami. "Then we take a 'whatever's necessary' approach to making sure our customers will ultimately rank GE first in every product area and performance category."

Hakami said he is especially proud to see GE trending upward when industry scores in general are flat or declining - which was the case with Clinical Systems over the last half of 2006.

"Our customers' patients take it for granted that their equipment works effectively," he added. "And we're committed to making sure that our customers can take it for granted, too, at least in terms of their GE systems. Towards that end, we're making a number of critical changes to our organization - including simplifying our business model and expanding our field-based resources to make our organization more responsive than ever."
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. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at www.gehealthcare.com.