A career helping Egyptians take care of their most valuable asset

“In developing countries without extensive safety nets, a healthy person has a better chance to prosper than an unhealthy person. Your health is the cornerstone of your career and your most valuable asset as a worker.”

That is the thinking of Mohamed Haroun , General Manager for North East Africa (Egypt, Sudan, Libya) at GE医疗 , who understands that illness can derail professional advancement and affect the trajectory of a worker’s entire life. Writ large, this can impact the vibrancy of an entire economy.

That is why working in the field of healthcare technology and leveraging it to help Egyptians, and people across the Middle East and Africa, to be as healthy as possible is Haroun’s driving purpose.

Although from a family “steeped in healthcare,” including doctors, surgeons and pharmacists, Haroun was more interested in engineering. Combining both fields, he elected to study biomedical engineering in university, so that he could “make people’s lives better through better access to technology in healthcare.”

After graduating, he knew he wanted to work for a large multinational that would offer world-class excellence, dynamism, access to the latest technologies, and create opportunities for knowledge transfer.

So, 27 years ago, he began his career as a field engineer, helping repair equipment for a major international healthcare company. He quickly moved to the sales side of the business, where he has been ever since, including a prior nine-year stint with GE and two years in his current role.

Excited about every day

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“I wake up excited every day to be working at GE HealthCare, a company with “the capacity, the expertise, and the muscles to help society, especially since there are so many ways to align country and company interest,” he said. “There are many different ways we are able to generate much greater value than just via a transactional way of doing business.”

Being a “good citizen” is beneficial to both GE HealthCare and #Egypt, he said.

For example, Egypt’s Ministry of Health launched a “Living with Dignity” program to bring quality primary healthcare services to all Egyptian, even those in remote or low-income areas.

“GE Healthcare has the means and capacity to deliver healthcare systems and expertise to more than 1,000 locations across the country, including providing technical expertise and training on medical systems,” that support the Living with Dignity program, he said.

GE HealthCare, in coordination with the Ministry, also designed and recently began implementing a non-invasive national prostate screening program that is the first of its kind in the Middle East and Africa, he said. Catching prostate cancer early is important because treatment is easier, while discovery at a late stage has significantly worse outcomes.

The protocol combines a conventional prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test with state-of-the-art MRI technology upgrades and AI-assisted scan analysis to identify patients early. Recognizing that oncology experts are not available in many parts of the country, the program sends MRI scans to a national screening Center of Excellence, where specialists review scans from across the country.

The mass screening program delivers strong clinical confidence. It is free to patients and low-cost to the Ministry.

GE HealthCare also is supporting the Ministry and the Unified Procurement Authority (UPA) to optimize medical equipment utilization and patient flow across the country by helping develop an asset monitoring and decision support center. The optimization solution helps maximize the economics of asset investment by increasing utilization and serving more patients.

Beyond direct patient-focused healthcare delivery, GE HealthCare also is supporting Egypt by sharing its well-known expertise in business operations, managerial systems and decision-making with the Ministry and UPA. “We have much more to offer than only our world-class products and solutions,” Haroun said.

Aligning with national goals

These activities in Egypt align with several of the Ministry and UPA’s long-term goals, including the Living with Dignity initiative.

Another patient-focused Ministry goal is to reorganize care delivery to be more outcomes based and tied to key performance indicators. Increasingly, this will involve public-private partnerships whereby private care providers deliver care, sometimes within public healthcare facilities. Longer term, the Ministry is looking to transform its role from primarily a care provider to primarily a regulator, while the private sector becomes the main provider of care.

Doing digital

At the same time, the industry is increasingly adopting digital and AI solutions, Haroun said. “Digital can help bring down costs and improve efficiencies, which reflect government priorities.”

GE HealthCare is increasingly engaging with customers in Egypt to raise awareness about digital healthcare in both operations and diagnostics. In operations, he said, it is about visibility regarding equipment performance, utilization, and maintenance status, as well as improving image quality in medical imaging systems. It also can help improve patient flow through a facility. In the second area of diagnostics, he said big data analytics and AI can support doctors in identifying anomalies in scans and in improving diagnostic confidence. Large data analysis also can detect and monitor emerging and longstanding public health trends.

Haroun emphasized that every conversation he has with customers makes clear that GE HealthCare’s digital solutions are vendor neutral. “When we propose a solution or speak with public or private entities about going digital, we make clear these are not solutions centered on GE products, they are centered on patient and customer needs, and what benefits them, no matter what equipment or technologies they are running.”

Healthcare for a healthy economy

For 27 years, Haroun has worked to bring the benefits of healthcare technologies to communities in Egypt, the Middle East and Africa, but in his current role, he has a special opportunity. “At an entity like GE HealthCare that is a good capable citizen, I’m able to participate in promoting the economic and social development of my country.”

Haroun may not be a doctor like other members of his family, but he’s certainly an expert in identifying a treatment that is crucial to building a strong and healthy Egypt.