 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. We're back here in San Francisco at the GE Industrial Cloud event. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Kelly of Wikibon and this is theCUBE, Silicon Angles Continuous Production. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We bring you the best guests. Jan DeWitt is here. He's the president and CEO of healthcare IT and performance solutions at GE. Jan, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks Dave for having me. Thanks, Jeff. Yeah, so we were talking a little bit off camera. You are essentially, we've been hearing a lot about the industrial internet, the industrial cloud, hearing about the solutions that GE is building, predictive analytics, et cetera. You're a consumer of these solutions, right? Talk about your business unit a little bit. Well, I mean, my business unit as part of GE Healthcare is providing IT systems for healthcare systems, whether it's departmental workflow solutions, EMR type systems, analytics on top of that. Yeah, okay, so very specific obviously to the healthcare business. Talk about what's happening in that business, how it's transforming and how you guys are responding. Yeah. I mean, first, I mean, I think this whole industrial net focus for my industry, for my business comes at the right time. Okay, if you look at healthcare, this is an industry that is going through a lot of pressures, reimbursements going down. And as an industry, a lot of pressure to drive and quality, okay, that's always been the case. But on top of that, there's now the productivity deliverable. Okay, this industry needs to find ways to mend its cost curve. Now, from an IT perspective, if you look back the past decade, a lot of money has been invested in what I would call digitizing many of the processes in healthcare. And since a couple of years, this is now shifting to what I call the next inning in this game, which is to drive interoperability and then analytics and workflow productivity. Okay, and that's where what we're building with the industrial internet is going to enable me to build better products that cater to those productivity and care quality needs. Now, you essentially mentioned, Jen, that the top line is getting squeezed a little bit. And that's certainly the case. We see it, it's obviously a big discussion in this country, there are other regions of the world where that transformation has taken place. What can we learn from that? What, first, I mean, you write everywhere in the world, there's the same pressure on healthcare. Population is growing fast, people getting older. The deficits are there. So society can't keep up with the rising cost. So the pressure is everywhere. Different things we can learn from different places, but what I would say from outside of the US, I see many of the European systems run more as integrated care systems. And that's a drive that I see coming in US now. What I used to say is that in a healthcare system, often the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, which leads to a lot of duplication in activity in healthcare, but also a miss in using information to make the best possible decision for a patient at a given time. And so I see some of the international healthcare systems do a better job in connecting their primary care with their acute care and making sure that the patients get tracked to the system and that at any point in time, you use the information, the full information you have on that patient to decide on the next step. So was that integrated sort of approach? Is that a mandate to really drive productivity? Is that something that you would advise? Certainly the IT organization and can help because it cuts across the entire sphere. Talk about that a little bit. Well, yes, I would call it a mandate. To me, healthcare is about a process. When you follow a patient that gets sick to when the patient gets cured, it's a process. And I think as an industry, we haven't always understood that. We've seen it too much as a sum of activities, but we never followed the patient. If you follow the patient, you see process, you see how you can use information at the early stage to prevent disease. Or at the given state in the disease, use information from a population to understand for two million other patients, this protocol works, that protocol didn't work. That's very valuable information to make the better decision. And that's again, where information technology in this industry is gonna be such a game changer. It's gonna enable this workflow to happen. It's gonna enable following the patient. And with analytics on the massive amounts of data now, there are ways to make better decisions today. So it sounds like the transition you're talking about is, the way I interpret it, is kind of that transition from fee for service model to the fee for care, fee for outcome. So rather than getting paid, a doctor getting paid for this procedure or that procedure, and essentially incentivizing clinicians to do more procedures, a set amount of funds for a particular outcome in a patient. Talk about how you're helping your healthcare clients manage that transition, get to that point. Is there, is that somewhere that we are in fact moving? Is there, are those right incentives in place to move us to that direction? And how is technology helping enable it? So today the right incentives are in place with some of the accountable care act that's passed some of the ACO models. Yeah, one of the early forms that you see today goes back to bundled payments, right? It's somewhere in between fee for service and taking full risk for a patient. Yeah, it's like you go for a knee replacement. And so your insurance would pay one fixed fee for the beginning to the end of that, okay? From the early diagnostics, the early consultations to the surgery, to the revalidation afterwards and so on. So one series of activities that in the past would be paid on a peractivity basis would be paid now on a fixed, okay? What we do in my business, we have one of our practice management products that provide bundled care, bundled payment capability, where you track this whole trajectory of care, both the activity and the cost that is attributed to it and then the tracking of the payment of it, okay? So yeah, one of our IT systems and other vendors IT systems enable this more longitudinal tracking of the patient through the care process. Okay, that's just one example. So taking kind of a step back or looking more long term. So here at the G event, hearing a lot about the kind of orchestrating activities and analytics across an ecosystem. How does that manifest itself in healthcare kind of in terms of long term, connecting, you know, clinicians and physicians from different organizations. What are some of the technological considerations in terms of cloud? We hear a lot about cloud in this event and that's got to have some significant impact on the way healthcare works with the regulations and security concerns. So long term, how do you see this playing out in healthcare? Yeah, I would say the holy grail in healthcare is gonna be in population health management, okay, where you within a population, okay, say a region, a big city, small country, yeah, one, two million, yeah, of lives covered. You're gonna identify certain risk populations. Now, could be different levels of risk, right? You do identify your population that today is susceptible to diabetes, okay? Or maybe earlier on, you're gonna identify population based on genetic propensity to develop certain diseases. I mean, you can, yeah, you try to be as early as you can. Yeah, but once you identify that cohort of patients with a certain risk profile, now you're gonna start to manage their wellness. You're gonna try to prevent them from becoming ill. Or when they become ill, yeah, you're gonna give them the best possible treatment, the best possible pathway to get cured again. So these are processes and analytics that really play above the level of a hospital or primary care. It really plays as at an integrated care, at an integrated delivery network level. And that's where, yeah, when we talk cloud, when we talk about bringing information up out of different silos in a healthcare system, okay? I mean, there's, yeah, typical healthcare system will have 20, 30, up to 80 different IT systems. And so, to be able to manage that level, you need to bring the information up, okay? And that's where cloud is a big capability. And then coupled with, again, workflow capabilities and analytic capabilities to track the patients through this care life cycle and apply analytics at the different points of decision. It's a whole new business model. So, Jan, we've heard a lot today, we're running out of time, but we've heard a lot today about a 1% improvement can have huge impact. So, you just described Nirvana in healthcare. Are we talking the better part of a decade before we can start approaching that 1% improvements? How long will this take? I see two phases. From our experience, working with performance solutions across the world in current care systems, bringing in basic good workflow process thinking and some minimum, if analytics, typically gets you between 10 and 20% of benefit. And then when it gets to the holy grail, right? Let's say five years from now, we're really going to have analytics. I mean, there's another 10 to 20% opportunity out there. And that's where, I think we're probably going to look back 10 years from now and it's going to say like information technology, things we do with industrial internet in healthcare are going to have delivered a step change. Okay, not a couple of percentages, but yeah, 20, 30% of improvement, cost, but also the care quality. And it's critical because if we don't do it, we're all in big trouble here. Yeah, do it. Thanks very much for stopping by theCUBE. Really appreciate your time. Great comments and thoughts. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be right back to wrap up here from San Francisco. This is theCUBE, Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly, we're right back.