The CEO POV: The Systems Approach to Reform Part II - Jeff Immelt - GE Healthcare Next Level

🎥 Jun 30, 2010 📺 GEHCNextLevel ⏱ 4m 👁 185 views

Visit us at http://nextlevel.gehealthcare.com Part II: GE CEO Jeff Immelt believes there is a critical need to approach healthcare reform as a "systems problem" that can be solved by aligning employers, providers, payors, technology, and public policy. Best practice sharing among all the stakeholders will lead to fundamental changes with far-reaching impact. Content-rich resources focused on helping you discover better ways to control costs, lead and strategize, improve quality and safety, and increase capacity. With a constant stream of fresh ideas, in-depth information and inspiration...

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About Jeffrey Immelt

Jeffrey Immelt, former Chairman and CEO of General Electric, participated in two public events in May 2026. At the Imagine 2026 conference on May 19, Immelt discussed leadership during technological disruption and the adoption of AI. He stated that an "AI winter" is inevitable, where people may say "it doesn't work" or that too much money has been spent, and emphasized the importance of perseverance through such crises. Immelt also said that AI will differentiate performance between hospitals, banks, and airlines, and that leaders must "exercise new muscles." He advised that tech professionals should not be the ones to explain technology to the public, saying "we should never let tech people talk about tech." On May 1, Immelt appeared as the inaugural Teevens Center Leadership Fellow at Dartmouth College. During the conversation, he said that leadership involves giving people truth and context, and that "there are two magic words to being a leader: blame me." He reflected on his own experience with imposter syndrome, stating he was "not comfortable enough in my own skin to say, I don't know." Immelt also commented on organizational culture, saying "your culture is only as good as the worst person you're willing to tolerate." He praised Dartmouth's current position, calling it "the best house in a bad neighborhood" and a "differentiated opportunity."

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Transcript (9 segments)

✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution

Jeffrey Immelt0:06

I just open up for questions and say thanks for coming. And you know, again, I hope you're getting from our team today, you know, tools and ideas and things like that about how we can work better together. But I'm happy to answer some questions.

Audience Member0:22

Just wanted to say, it's exciting. I think your focus on cost, quality, and access with Healthy Imagination 15% is an ambitious goal, and it's coming at a time when we're anticipating in our healthcare field a surge of activity in terms of more insured folks through the healthcare reform. I enjoyed reading about your concept of reverse innovation and how you've been using that, particularly with technology. Are there lessons to be learned in the developing countries where they've had to deal with population growth much more aggressively than we've seen about the processes of managing surge and handling increased capacity for access management?

Jeffrey Immelt1:06

It's a great question. You know, it was quite interesting. So we had this advisory board this morning and we did the same thing in energy maybe five years ago and I learned quite a lot. I mean what I found was that we had NGOs, we had people in government, we had venture capitalists, stuff like that. I actually found over the last five years I became much smarter about energy by having this advisory council and having it be so diverse. There would actually be meetings I looked forward to going to, which I can't say that about many of my meetings these days.

And so Newt Gingrich is one of the guys on the panel, right? He just happens to be one of the smartest guys — politics aside, right — he is such a brilliant guy. And you know, one of the things that he suggests to us, I think, is actually quite good: is that we try to congregate, you know, 25 experiments that we either run with you, or we bring from other countries, and say, look, here is a real best practice from this place.

You know, I can just think of one that'll turn your stomach, but I'll mention it just because I think it makes your point. And I think Mark's probably been there — I don't know if Omar's down here — but if you go to these big thoracic surgery places in India, right, one physician will do 20 open heart surgeries in a day. In a day, right? The patients are up walking around like two hours after their surgery. It costs 2,000 bucks. And you sit there and say, how many lawyers do I have to hire, you know, what would I possibly do? But that exists. I've seen it. I've been there. It is stunning.

And you know, because I've studied healthcare, I sit there and say, who's the heart doctor you want to go to? It's the one that's done the most surgeries. So I say to my wife, look, if I'm having — fly me to Delhi, right? If you're really, you know, if I'm looking a little pale, you know, you think I might last a day or so, this is the guy that's done the most. So I don't know how good those are for all of you. In other words, some of these things just can't be done in the system we're in today.

But even inside the US, if there's ways to share these experiments, I actually think that's something GE can do on a systemwide basis — is go, what Virtua's done, what Kaiser's doing, what exists in rural clinics and things like that. Because a lot of this is going to be best practice sharing, and some of the lowest cost systems are outside the United States.

I mean really, if I just put on my citizen hat, right, and not my CEO of GE hat — you know, even if you go to Western Europe, guys are pumping through 30, 40 MRI patients a day and every MRI scanner, they're running these MR centers 24 hours a day. They're doing good standards of care, they're doing high quality, they've got good radiologists, they've got good diagnostics, and they're just working the equipment 24 hours a day.

And I think we're going to have to be more open to — and our business has to be very open to supporting you in activities that are going to help lead you to lower cost. And you know, it's just systems — we can't base our business on systems and efficiency. We've got to base our business on high quality, low cost standards of care.