GE Healthcare: 63 Years of History, Countless Advances in Healthcare

GE’s 120 years of history are summed up in its annual reports, which have now been compiled by a new GE healthymagination data visualization. These reports give an incredibly detailed history on the company, and an insight on the progress achieved throughout its’ existence.

General Electric Company was incorporated on April 15th, 1892 as a merger between Edison General Electric Company (created in 1872) and the Thomson-Houston Electric Company. At the time the reason for the merger was that the expansion of both companies meant increasing difficulties for either company to produce complete electrical installations relying solely on their own patents and technologies. The new company had three to railway companies, lighting and mining. Their first report illustrated the advances that the company had made in licensing, and providing better services to their clientele: “The largest lighting generators in use in February 1st, 1892 were capable of supplying only 2,000 incandescent lights each. Many local lighting stations are being equipped with steam engines directly coupled to such machines, giving a capacity of about 25,000 incandescent lights from each engine,” the report said. The company’s ambition is inherent in this report, demonstrating that GE strove to offer high quality products at low cost.

The company began its healthcare innovations with the development of x-rays. “A 50,000,000-volt biased betatron producing high-energy x-rays is expected to have value in cancer research,” it says in the GE 1948 report. This innovation in diagnostic imaging set the company’s presence in healthcare in motion. GE continued to be a supplier of x ray equipment, and in 1964 they began to expand their service in medical electronics. “A patient care system, new in hospital tests, continuously monitors the condition of cardiac patients.” These visionaries might have never imagined that in 2012, there would be 46,000 employees worldwide dedicated to GE Healthcare.

In 1975, the company’s report was proud to announce that General Electric was the worldwide leader in diagnostic imaging equipment used by physicians in diagnosis and treatment. That year, GE accomplished the development of a computerized tomography (CT) scanner, a system aimed at reducing the amount of invasive exploratory surgery.

Just ten years later in 1998 high tech response technology was developed with the launch of the Lightspeed CT scanning device, a device that gave doctors the ability to acquire multiple thin and thick internal image slices simultaneously, providing more precision images faster.

Soon GE Healthcare developed specific medical exam devices for women, like the full field digital mammography which was introduced for the first time in 2000; an important development in the fight against breast cancer because of the high quality resolution imaging.

From the first Annual Report in 1892, which included the company’s establishment on the to the last one created in 2011, the company has always been a pioneer in the field their achievements and the progress in the field of healthcare, electricity and their common goal: to create innovative, useful products and services for people worldwide.

Find out all this details on this detailed visualization traces the company’s evolution in the words of its participants. We encourage you to have a look at the “curing” section where you would find the information related to GE Healthcare’s activities from 1948 to 2011: http://visualization.geblogs.com/visualization/annual/

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