Two GE businesses named the most innovative in the world

The report sifts through thousands of enterprises each year, searching for those that tap both heartstrings and purse strings and use the engine of commerce to make a difference in the world.

GE’s businesses have made a number of appearances on the list in the past since 2008. This year, GE made the magazine’s list of top 2 in energy sector for building the first America’s offshore wind farm while GE Healthcare made it into top 4 health innovators in the world for reducing pain points at healthcare facilities.

Block Island Wind Farm – First America’s offshore wind farm

Construction on the Block Island Wind Farm was completed in mid-August when the last of 15 blades, each 240-foot-long (nearly 74 metres), was fastened in place.

The five fully assembled GE Haliade turbines, each standing as high as the Statue of Liberty, are ready to be commissioned and tested.

The Block Island wind farm brings together the massive Haliade turbines, whose blade tips tower 600 feet above the water, generator is split into three separate electrical circuits so that even if two circuits go offline, the turbine can still produce two megawatts of electricity on the remaining circuit; and GE’s innovative gearless permanent magnet generators that can each produce six megawatts of power.

The combination has the potential to transform the renewables business both in the US and abroad.

Once online, the wind farm will generate a combined 30 megawatts of electricity enough to power 17,000 homes and turn Block Island into the most powerful coastal enclave in the northeast.

The project is expected to generate 125,000 megawatt-hours of electricity which is enough to meet 90 per cent of Block Island’s power needs and even supply surplus electricity to the mainland via undersea cable.

GE Healthcare’s solutions for pressing problems in the sector

One of the most outstanding results comes from GE Healthcare’s partnership with Johns Hopkins Hospital to effectively operate their Capacity Command Center to better manage patient flow in and around the hospital.

GE team creates custom-build software to transform it into a NASA-style command centre. There, 22 high-resolution screens line the walls, providing a continuous stream of real-time images and data from 14 different sources.

That data enables command centre staff to sense risk, prioritize activity for the benefit of all patients, and trigger interventions to accelerate patient flow.

To do it, the staff use one programme with a digital twin of the hospital to predict patient activity for the next 48 hours, another algorithm tells the staff which room turn or patient discharge would reduce wait time, yet another senses when staffing levels have dropped to dangerously low measures and can alert administrators.

Early results from Johns Hopkins have been promising: The hospital has reported a 60 per cent improvement in the ability to accept patients with complex medical conditions from other hospitals around the region and country; its ambulances are able to get dispatched 63 minutes sooner to patients at outside hospitals; and its emergency department is assigning patients to beds 30 per cent faster.

At the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), clinicians are also working in partnership with GE Healthcare to develop a library of deep learning algorithms to revolutionise the speed at which scans are interpreted and patients receive care.