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.

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