health services administration

· Case Study 2: GE Healthcare (B): A CSR Dilemma

Due Week 11 and worth 200 points

 

Read the case study titled “GE Healthcare (B): A CSR Dilemma” located in the XanEdu case pack (Link Below)

Reviewing the case study titled “GE Healthcare (A): Innovating for Emerging Markets” may be helpful in supporting your arguments.

 

Write a two to three (2-3) page paper in which you:

1. Determine two (2) specific ethical issues that General Electric (GE) Healthcare faced when implementing its strategy to introduce low cost diagnostic equipment to developing countries. Recommend two (2) actions that GE can take to resolve these ethical issues.

2. Analyze the concepts of professional and applied ethics and determine whether GE Healthcare breeched these concepts in the development of its low cost alternatives for diagnostic medical equipment. Provide one (1) specific example to support your rationale.

3. Determine whether GE Healthcare has any responsibility in resolving the issue of a preference for male children in cultures where its diagnostic ultrasound products are sold. Recommend one (1) strategy that would enable GE Healthcare to balance its responsibility of continued growth and development with any ethical or moral concerns investors and human rights groups might have regarding the use of its equipment in controlling the birth rates of male children in some cultures.

Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:

. Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; citations and references must follow APA or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.

. Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment page length.

The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:

. Analyze the roles of and the relationships among organizational mission, vision, values, and strategic goals, and why they are called directional strategies.

. Apply analytic skills to define strategic problems, generate and evaluate strategic alternatives, and develop implementation tactics.

. Use technology and information resources to research issues in the strategic management of health care organizations.

. Write clearly and concisely about strategic management of health care organizations using proper writing mechanics.

 Grading for this assignment will be based on answer quality, logic / organization of the paper, and language and writing skills, using the following rubric

 

GE Healthcare (B):

A CSR Dilemma              

The Venue 40 Ultrasound

In the 1990s, GE had attempted to develop an inexpensive ultrasound machine focused on offering the basic ultrasound functionality using PC-based software. These efforts were subsequently shelved because the machine’s performance was not considered adequate for GE’s mainstream markets. However, a decade later, the idea was revived by GE’s China R&D team as worth exploring for the local market, given the trade-offs that low-income consumers there were willing to make and the technologically more advanced laptop-based platforms that could now be potentially used.

The R&D team in China came up with a compact ultrasound - the Venue 40 - that relied on touch-screen technology and eliminated the buttons, knobs and keyboards of conventional machines. Further, the device’s smooth surface facilitated the cleanliness required in sterile environments, and its intuitive interface appealed to physicians new to ultrasound.

While GE’s conventional machines could cost over $100,000, the cheapest Venue 40 sold for under $20,000. Soon after the product’s China launch in 2009, GE started selling different variants in other emerging markets and in untapped segments back in developed markets.1

fraction of illegitimate practitioners continued to manage access to ultrasound machines by other means and GE remained a regular target of NGO protests and court cases.

GE faced a dilemma, especially as it was trying to portray many of its BOP-related efforts as CSR initiatives. How aggressively should it market ultrasound machines to the mass market beyond large hospitals? Was it worth being conservative, even at the risk of losing a large chunk of legitimate sales? More broadly, how far should it get involved in trying to fix the core issue - a continuing preference for male children in some cultures