The computerisation of the NHS is not on its sickbed – it’s alive and kicking, explains the boss of GE Healthcare
Nigel Mason is apologetic when he arrives at GE’s British head office in Berkeley Square, central London. This isn’t his building, explains the boss of GE Healthcare UK as we wait for security to sign him in. Once his visitor’s badge has been clipped to his jacket, we’re ushered into G4, an ultra-modern but poky little room. By then, though, he’s done saying sorry. And by the time we get to the subject of the much-criticised NHS computerisation project, he’s bridling a bit at the very suggestion that he should be on the defensive.
“I’m proud of our role,” he insists. “It’s a positive story.”
Mason has been head of GE Healthcare International’s Public-Private Partnership team since 2004, two years before he added the title of country manager to his job description, and he clearly takes the project personally.
His company is responsible for the picture archive and communications system (Pacs) in the southern cluster, one of five broad NHS regions. Every one of the hospitals had their Pacs delivered both on time and on budget, he claims.
“As a result of the successful roll-out, we were asked to take an active part in the North-west and West Midlands, where a previous incumbent had been struggling.”
Pacs has had two technical failures in the past 18 months, he admits, but in both cases the backup kicked in immediately and the medics using the system to look up patients’ X-rays or scans weren’t even aware there was a problem.
GE Healthcare, which has its global HQ in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, is one of the biggest players in the medical technology sector, supplying a wide range of equipment including big-ticket items such as magnetic resonance (MR), positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT) scanners. Since 2004 when it bought Amersham – the first company privatised by Margaret Thatcher – GE has also had a presence in the pharmaceutical side of medicine. Worldwide, it has earnings of $17bn (around £8.5bn); in the UK, it has 2,800 employees.
And even in with recession starting to bite in the US, the American conglomerate is unlikely to retrench in its core market. “The UK is relatively small in global terms, less than 10 per cent of our business. But what that masks is the importance of the international market relative to the US. We genuinely do see ourselves as a global company, rather than a US company doing business overseas, which is what it might have been five years ago.”
Mason’s job is to figure out which of a dizzying range of technologies is best suited to a particular task, and then persuade NHS trusts to see things his way. “Healthcare cannot go on expanding its budget for ever,” he says. “For example, we produce six diagnostic tools that can be appropriate for coronary artery disease.”
He starts ticking them off on his fingers without pausing to explain what they do, let alone how they work: “echo cardiography, stress ECG, myocardial scintigraphy, multi-slice CT, cath lab and PET”. Each is understood well individually, but until recently there has been no assessment of their relative merits. Mason’s team has now developed a model showing which works best for patients in different risk groups, and will be sending it out to cardiologists for trials within the next few months.
Appropriate technology is also central to GE Healthcare’s response to the Government’s proposals for polyclinics – super surgeries with 20 or 30 doctors. Although critics complain that these would herald the end of personalised GP services, Mason thinks they would have the opposite effect, bringing medicine closer to patients.
“After you see your GP, if you need anything more elaborate than a pill, you have to get an appointment and go to a hospital five or 10 miles away,” he explains. “But patients who don’t need to go into an acute setting should never go there. This will be a lot better for the patient and from a cost point of view.”
The only question is whether a given polyclinic will need its own MR scanner (price tag £700,000) or just a bone densitometer – a low-level X-ray machine that can detect osteoporosis or identify “tofis”, people who are Thin on the Outside and Fat Inside. “Potentially, people like me, who look relatively slim, could be at risk because they have a build-up of fat around key organs,” he says.
In his late forties with a thick head of silver hair, Mason prides himself on being a walking endorsement of “early health”, and still pursues windsurfing – a sport he took up at university. His other great interest is restoring and racing classic cars. In 1998 he co-drove a blue 1959 Jaguar Mark 9 in the classic Monte Carlo Rally, finishing a respectable 36th out of 200.
Such competitive, adrenalin-fuelled sports just add to Mason’s image as a confident, go-ahead corporate executive. But hidden inside is something less common. Unlike most people at his level, his degree was not in business or finance but science, specialising in nuclear medicine. “I studied biophysics [at York] in the second year it was offered, before it was even known as a viable subject,” he says.
His Masters thesis, completed while he was working at Barts hospital in London, was the development of a “tissue equivalent phantom for CT” – in essence a three-dimensional test card for the scanners. Although he demurs when it is suggested that he actually understands all his products, Mason admits to deriving pleasure from being able to keep up with developments in his field.
He is also enthusiastic about ultrasound and uses it to illustrate several of his points, such as the pace of miniaturisation and convergence. “Five years ago, ultrasound was the size of a domestic fridge, wheeled around on a trolley,” he says. “Now it’s not much bigger than my portfolio here and soon it will be the size of my BlackBerry.”
Images of Dr McCoy’s tricorder on Star Trek spring to mind, but Mason immediately brings me back to Earth. “Several ambulance trusts are looking at ultrasound,” he says. “It could be life-saving with appropriate training, but we don’t want to put this diagnostic tool out into the hands of anybody.”
By convergence, he means that separate technologies are being used together to get results that neither could achieve alone. One example is the combination two years ago of PET scans and CT scans. “PET looks at function, down to molecular pathways, but you end up with a bright dot in the middle of blackness. That’s not much use to a surgeon,” Mason explains. “By using a CT scanner, which gives good spatial resolution, he’s able to see that hotspot in full three-dimensional context. Ultrasound could be next, he says, combining with the catheters and X-ray machines used in cath labs to investigate heart function.
Other than that hint, Mason is cagey about what his fellow scientists are working on in their labs. But he’s optimistic that the pipeline of ideas will continue to flow. “We’re moving from a world of ‘I believe our technology can do that’ to ‘I can prove our technology can do that’.”
