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.

Back to HCB News

More Voices