GE Healthcare and its partner Advanced Technology Company (ATC), which has been selected as a key technology provider by the Kuwait MoH, announced details at Arab Health in Dubai, the mega healthcare exhibition and medical congress happens in the Middle East.
Some of GE’s latest technologies will equip specialized Kuwaiti facilities such as the new expansion of Dabous Cardiac Center and the 150-bed Sabah Al Ahmad Cardiac Center which will both open in 2015. They will both include GE’s Revolution CT, one of the latest CT technologies designed especially for high quality imaging of the heart, helping to cater for the increased prevalence of cardiac disease in Kuwait. Revolution CT images allow healthcare professionals to make more confident decisions and may help to prevent more expensive invasive procedures, particularly for cardiac patients with high or irregular heart rates.
GE Healthcare will also provide integrated oncology solutions for the new Kuwait Cancer Control Hospital (KCC), which will be the third biggest oncology center in the world, with 650 beds, due to open in 2017. This will include the SIGNA PET/MR, GE Healthcare’s first-ever integrated, simultaneous PET/MR system, which is being launched this week at Arab Health. Magnetic Resonance (MR) is excellent for imaging soft tissue as well as functional and structural details. When you combine PET and MR, clinicians can fuse anatomical images and biochemistry data together to pinpoint an area of cell growth, which may shorten the time between diagnosis and treatment.
“Think of a MR image as a geographic map and the PET image as the weather system,” explained Maher Abouzeid, President & CEO of GE Healthcare in Turkey & the Middle East. “The two images together, just like a weather map on the local news, provide both the location of the tumor in the body and the molecular activity in the tumor. Changes in tumor function often precede changes in tumor size, so PET/MR systems can allow early indication of disease progression, and a patient’s response to treatment. This potentially allows oncologists to modify treatment strategies to help improve patients’ quality of life and overall patient outcomes, whilst potentially reducing the cost burden of ineffective treatment.”
Elsewhere, the Sabah Al Ahmad Urology Center, a 100-bed hospital and the first center of its kind in Kuwait, is fully equipped with GE Healthcare technology, including the GE Optima MR450w scanner, designed for a better patient experience because the area where the patient lies is wider than in conventional scanners. It is also more comfortable to lie on thanks to the system’s GEM Suite, patient friendly, flexible ‘coils’ which minimize anxiety and motion during an exam by naturally following the contours of the human body. Finally, the Al Razi Hospital, due to open in the summer of 2015, and focused on ‘extremities’, such as hands and feet, which will be equipped with GE’s latest digital radiography x-ray solutions.
In 2010, Kuwait launched its KD30bn ($105bn) National Development Plan (Kuwait Vision 2030). One important objective is to modernize the healthcare infrastructure of the country in order to meet the needs of a growing population with a rise in non-communicable diseases (NCDs), such as cancer or cardiovascular disease, which are now considered to be the most pressing health issue the country is facing. According to the WHO (World Health Organization), NCDs accounted for 76% of deaths in Kuwait (as of 2011), and coronary heart disease has become the single leading cause of death, according to the Dasman Diabetes Institute (DDI)*.
Engineer Samir Al-Asfour, the Undersecretary for General Services at the Ministry of Health, said: “We are committed to improving access for our citizens to high quality healthcare and technology that can help diagnose and tackle diseases like cancer and cardiovascular diseases which alone are estimated to cause 46 percent of all the country’s mortalities.”**
Maher Abouzeid, GE Healthcare, concluded: “We are proud to partner with the MoH and to provide GE’s technology to such sophisticated healthcare centers in the country.”
Learn more about GE Healthcare at Arab Health 2015
GE Healthcare is one of the largest participants at Arab Health, with a booth over 525 sq. m in area which has been designed to mirror the hospital environment that customers encounter every day, while providing insight on the innovations that GE brings to each care setting. Visit: gehcarabhealth2015.com
Also this year, GE Healthcare is introducing for the first time the “GE Arab Health” mobile app to help visitors navigate their way through the new technologies GE is presenting at Arab Health 2015. The app uses geo-targeting to deliver content about GE’s products and solutions to the mobile app user based on his/her location on the booth.
As Platinum Sponsor of the event, GE Healthcare is also extending its support to the show conferences on Big Data, Leaders in Healthcare, Biomed Leaders and Radiology.
Source: http://www.albawaba.com/business/pr/ge-healthcare-kuwait-649320
