GE HealthCare at Morgan Stanley Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Tuesday, 09 September 2025, GE HealthCare Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:GEHC) participated in the Morgan Stanley 23rd Annual Global Healthcare Conference, presenting a strategic overview that highlighted both promising growth areas and challenges. The company outlined its focus on innovation and market expansion, while addressing market dynamics in China and opportunities in AI-driven solutions.

Key Takeaways

• GE HealthCare is heavily investing in R&D, focusing on AI and digital capabilities to improve healthcare productivity and outcomes.
• The company anticipates moderate growth in China, despite recent market downturns due to anti-corruption campaigns.
• Strategic M&A activities, particularly "tuck-in" acquisitions, are a priority to enhance product offerings.
• New product launches, including cardiac CT and PET imaging, are expected to drive growth.
• The company is addressing healthcare challenges like labor shortages and operational efficiencies through advanced imaging technologies.

Financial Results

• The Chinese market saw a double-digit decline in 2024, but GE HealthCare expects it to stabilize or slightly decline this year.
• Long-term growth in China is projected to reach mid-single digits.
• R&D investment has nearly doubled since 2018, underscoring the focus on innovation.
• The company aims for 1% to 2% medium-term growth driven by new products like Vscan Air SL.
• Record backlog book to bill indicates a strong order pipeline exceeding current sales.

Operational Updates

• Significant growth is observed in cardiac CT and nuclear medicine, fueled by new diagnostic agents.
• GE HealthCare plans to launch a new cardiovascular ultrasound platform and whole-body PET and vascular suites.
• The introduction of Vscan Air SL, a new ultrasound product, is part of a robust cycle of product launches expected through 2026.
• AI integration across products aims to enhance efficiency and healthcare outcomes.

Future Outlook

• GE HealthCare anticipates a robust opportunity for orders, with new products shipping until late 2026 into 2027.
• The company expects annual improvements, focusing on M&A to capitalize on market dislocations.
• 2026 is projected to be pivotal as GE HealthCare introduces more AI capabilities.
• Continued growth is expected in vascular and neurovascular procedures.

Q&A Highlights

• The company plans to accelerate the replacement cycle to broaden its install base due to high utilization.
• PET capacity constraints are anticipated as more molecules are adopted for therapy and diagnosis.
• Changes in reimbursement for PDX are expected to drive further growth.
• There is visible demand for Alzheimer’s diagnosis and therapies.
• Patient monitoring is transforming to use longitudinal data for predictive analysis.

In conclusion, GE HealthCare is poised for strategic growth through innovation and market expansion. For a complete understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Morgan Stanley 23rd Annual Global Healthcare Conference:

Patrick, US MedTech Team: Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for joining. It’s Patrick on the US MedTech team. Firstly, disclaimers. www.bolixani.com/researchdisclosures, which is a great website. I recommend you all go there for fun. Much more excited to have GE HealthCare today. We’ve got Peter, CEO, and Carolynne, who’s Head of Strategy. Great to have you guys here.

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Great to be here.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: We appreciate you coming to the conference. There’s a lot going on in radiology. I think we could start kind of almost anywhere. It’s quite topical at the moment. We were just chatting about it. Maybe we can start within the core imaging business and some of the fastest growing areas, cardiac CT. CT is a great market for you guys globally. We’d love to get a sense of how your things are going, how cardiac has sort of grown in the U.S. and elsewhere. Interesting in general for CT.

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah, I mean, look, first of all, again, thanks for having us. It’s been a robust procedures market really around the world, which I think is one of the interesting things to your point about it being good to be in radiology or even cardiology broadly. Aging population and also just the amount of devices from, you know, our cousins, so to speak, in the device world that are fundamentally tied to an imaging procedure. As many of the imaging companies, you know, we’ve all benefited from it. To your point about what’s really doing well, I think, you know, CT obviously is booming across the board. In many ways, it’s kind of the Swiss Army knife of diagnosis.

Even the labor shortages that are out there move to drive a market like that because in two minutes, you can understand what the issue is with someone as opposed to three or four visits. As much as that kind of methodology, you know, in the past where you’d see a primary care and then they’d see a specialist before you got imaging, it’s happening a lot earlier. To your point on cardiac CT, it’s happening even more. I’ve been involved in CT for many years, but way back when, when the first scanners could do kind of a triple rule out of a pulmonary emboli or an aortic dissection or a coronary blockage, it’s evolved so much more. This idea of doing virtual FFR, being able to make a decision relative before you intervene, obviously all the early screening, we’re seeing definitely strong growth in that area.

I think photon counting is only going to continue to help drive that to the next level. We don’t have ours out, but you know, stay tuned for more news here in the near future. I’d say we’re on track to all the dates we spoke of. That’s super exciting. The other area, Patrick, is in nuclear medicine, which has been a little bit of a sleepy area for many years. There hasn’t been a lot going on. Now that’s just exploding. It’s exploding because of new agents, both therapeutic as well as diagnostic, driving that space, in particular PET. We’re seeing lots of growth in there. I’m sure we’ll come back to talk more about that. MR is just one of those great modalities that’s continuing. It’s always been this gold standard in contrast and capabilities for soft tissue.

Now it’s also doing so much more even with resolution, no radiation. Obviously, all comers can utilize the technology. We just see robust markets, driven by aging population, procedures that are needed to assist in actually delivery of devices. This idea of when it’s tight for labor—do you want someone having four visits when you don’t have enough people, or do you want to go definitively to a diagnosis early? We’re seeing more of that happening in healthcare systems around the world.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: You mentioned MR. I actually were chatting before this about a really interesting company in Cytech. They have a great platform. One of the things that hold them and many other companies back is that just scanner time access.

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: It’s featuring neurologists and basically, it’s just time on the MR. You know, particularly in the U.S., but I guess globally, how tight is, I mean, it feels like the install base is quite heavily utilized. Are we at a point where we need to see a little bit of acceleration of that replacement cycle to broaden out the install base? It feels like block time is pretty limited.

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah, it’s an interesting phenomenon. Around the world, you just have wait times that are significantly longer than they were pre-COVID. There are lots of theories on why that is. I think they come back to the points that I just previously made. Particularly in MR, where the historical slots were a one-hour slot, maybe 45 minutes, we’ve advanced the space. Others have as well. We kind of led with this Air Recon DL, which again is using deep learning to fundamentally change how an MR produces an image. The result is better image quality, but the bigger result for productivity is you can do a 20-minute exam on most capabilities. Having providers get their slots down so that they can fundamentally double their capabilities is a big part of it. The fleet in the U.S. for most imaging equipment, most, is eight to 10 years.

If you look around the world, it’s probably six to seven. Some of that was during COVID. Nobody wanted you in their hospital doing a big installation, right? It just didn’t happen. You have that buildup. The growth of ambulatory, surgical, and outpatient centers that are doing more sophisticated procedures, hips, knees, cardio procedures, all of those need that additional equipment. It’s one of the reasons when we see tight capital questions coming up and say, "Gee, I may have to make a decision on my capital. Where do we usually end up on the scale?" Sometimes something like monitoring might be a second or third priority, but you typically always see the big imaging as a first priority because it is a core generator of revenue and it’s an enabler of productivity.

Carolynne, Head of Strategy, GE HealthCare: PET is another area where we would expect to see capacity constraints over time, especially as more of these molecules are being adopted for drug therapy and diagnosis.

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah, and to that point, what’s happening with FLCiO, our newest agent in the diagnostic space for myocardial perfusion, is pretty exciting. I think that’s going to be a game changer from the standpoint of what you can do with perfusion. We talked about cardiac CT. There are different tools, obviously, for coronary assessment, but for perfusion of the heart muscle and ischemic disease, this is really going to change the gold standard from what’s been done in SPECT for years. Lots happening there, and ultimately, that’s going to drive cardiac practices to want to have their own dedicated systems.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: Yeah, that’s a good point on the PET and SPECT side of things. Why don’t we do FLCiO given that it’s come up? A lot of success, good partnerships now. Maybe to level set the room for people who might be less familiar around, you know, Rhodium and what FLCiO brings to the table and the half-life benefits and outside, just to paint the picture so people can understand within perfusion the opportunity set for FLCiO.

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah, so even just bigger picture, right? Forever a SPECT camera, which is a basic two-head nuclear med camera, you might go in, you get a study at rest, you have a study at stress. It could be two, three hours you’re laying there on the table to get the study after you’ve gone through that. That study would tell you if you have certain parts of your heart are not actually getting proper perfusion, right? PET comes along in the space. The only agent fundamentally was ammonia or rubidium, which has a half-life of about 90 seconds in that window, which means you have to make it right there next to the bed because it’s gone in 90 seconds. It drops off. Organizations have done quite well with rubidium, with the generator. There are costs and limitations of what that means to move into the SPECT world.

SPECT has, I think, 5,000, 6,000 some procedures that are done in that area. If you look at the PET version of it, it’s still a very small percentage of it. The question is, well, why? With a product like FLCiO that’s come out, it does a couple of things. One is you can take that 20, 30, or two, three-hour study and just like with rubidium, take that down to say 20 to 30 minutes, but not have to have a generator. You can actually have a drug shipped to your department on demand. The resolution of these is significantly better, meaning you have false positives and sensitivity specificity that is significantly better than what’s out there in the marketplace. The other area is radiation dose. It’s a lower dose to the patient and also works better on larger patients.

Obviously, we have a challenge from 20 years ago to have larger patients. It really kind of brings all of that together. There is a lot of excitement about bringing that into the portfolio on top of the hope of more molecules coming in the pipeline that might be in oncology and other areas. The dialogue at the top of the house in a health system is we need to really think about our PET strategy relative to how it plays out for diagnosis, but also then how it supplements therapeutic delivery.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: Within PDX in general, there’s obviously been a big sea change in how it’s reimbursed, being expanded.

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: Not really a cost line anymore. Now it’s actually getting paid for, I would argue, properly. What are you seeing in terms of that? How are the customers responding? It takes a bit of time for people to get familiar with the fact that there’s been changes. What are the changes on the customer level?

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah, so it’s, to your point, Patrick, it’s slow to kind of, all these reimbursement things typically don’t happen overnight, but it’s a huge deal. A PET study that you got $200 for FDG because it was like a supply forever, now a product that costs $4,500, you get reimbursed at $4,500. You get the reimbursement for the scan separately. All of a sudden, a study in the old reimbursement, and again, this is the U.S. model with CMS, it wouldn’t be economical to do so. Now, not only is it economical, it actually makes sense that in the spectrum of how you set this up, that it can be an area that you can drive a reasonable profit. We ultimately think this is going to really be important.

It’s a key part of how we speak with customers to help educate them, obviously, about the drug, about how you think about payment structures, how you think about process. That becomes a really important part of this because unlike a drug that comes into a vial and you can stock it, this is made every day for you for that patient. If it’s not used, it has a half-life and means it expires. How you set that up in a proprietary way that works for a customer becomes very important for them, but it also creates a really interesting stickiness to a company like GE HealthCare that this may not be the only molecule you buy from it. You might buy many. We think this is a really nice franchise that we’re going to obviously continue to grow.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: It’s one of the things I never really thought about here. Like what happens when the patient doesn’t turn up? If the half-life is out and it expires, is that built into your pricing agreements with the customers, or is it just kind of they just eat it? How does that work?

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: It varies by customer, but as you ramp up, let’s just start how this is. When you go, you’re making these in CMOs geographically, and let’s just say there might be 40 doses in a given cyclotron batch, and you only have five patients that day, right? 35 get thrown out, and that just hits your gross margin. The more that actually those are consumed, and as you start out any new molecule, the margins are going to be low and they’re going to rise. For the customer, when they start out and they only have a couple of patients, typically it is a loss. As you have a larger patient pool, you obviously can substitute doses around and manage within your own departments. Part of that would be, we would work with them on services if they’ve had a big fallout rate. What do you need to do process-wise?

Like other visits, this is one you want to make sure people don’t miss. There are a lot of techniques to make sure that they don’t do that. Partnering with someone who can help you administer process change, not just sell you a product, we believe in this space is a big differentiator.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: We were doing a doc call the other day, and I was a little surprised because I have deep indoor cynicism on Alzheimer’s. I was there for a reason, you know, Biogen and your Mobile Life Healthcare during that whole thing. They were specifically calling out the big increase in visible demand. I’d just like to be curious to see how you guys are seeing demand on that side. Maybe for the audience who’s less familiar, kind of flag visible the opportunity there.

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah, so there’s again, back to PET imaging, but now moving from the heart to the brain for Alzheimer’s. As we all know, amyloid beta plaque is one of the indicators that can be a leading cause play into the Alzheimer’s space. Not fully definitive, but highly suspect. A product that we make called Visinal actually lights up the amount of amyloid beta in the brain to the level that you can quantify and understand what that is. You need to be able to have that type of diagnosis to be able to then go on one of the actual therapies that Patrick had actually mentioned. After each of the administration there of the drug, you need to actually do an MRI follow-up because one of the side effects potentially from the therapies is potentially swelling, potentially some microbleeds.

You can see how then imaging for diagnosis to see what you need, therapy and follow-up, every injection afterwards, you need to actually do a follow-up MRI. The diagnostic part of this becomes very, very important. As much as saying side effect potential for microbleed and swelling, it seems rather challenging. We all know when there is no really other alternative for Alzheimer’s at this point in time, it becomes a real viable risk to take. We are seeing good uptake in that space. I think the opportunity for tools added into the portfolio as well to help the clinicians manage those patients, the changes in those patients, all of that is a big part of it.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: Carolynne, I don’t know if you’d agree with this, but I feel like in all the meetings that I have on GE HealthCare, one division that literally never comes up is patient monitoring. You need a big hire in Ginette. That surprised a lot of people, very well regarded as a hire. You also have some interesting venture stakes in companies like AliveCore and things like that. It clearly matters to you guys in a way that sometimes maybe the market isn’t asking about as much. Are you surprised that you didn’t get asked about it? How do you feel about Ginette joining and what should we be thinking of when we think of patient monitoring?

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah, so Ginette Bankus, who joined us from Alcon previously, 15 years with Boston Sci, a lot of different things that she’s done. One is a super good operator and someone who also has a pretty good digital background. If you look at that business, you know, it’s a collection of different businesses, but the one common thread that they have is they have a great opportunity to be enabled on how we deliver with digital capabilities. We have a leading position in anesthesia, just brought out a new platform first in 20 years. We have a leading position, one of the top two in monitoring globally. Also, in the whole baby prenatal care area as well and some diagnostic cardiology. The one interesting comment about all of those is they play a big monitoring role and they also have a lot of data that’s shared across those.

In that portfolio as well is where we’ll bring to market things like Command Center and what we call Care Intellect, which are new digital AI tools that are focused on not just a product, but how products work in a department in maybe perinatal care or particularly in a diagnostic cardiology area where we take a look at our Muse database, which is the largest EKG database in the world and how that information can flow through cardiology. That’s what you’re going to see there. What is interesting in there are a lot of interesting small talk in place that can fit into that business to connect. She’s got a great background there. You know, we talked about this at our investor day.

One of the big opportunities is to really transform monitoring to be a modality that just gives you a spot reading primarily in critical care into one that actually looks at your longitudinal data and can actually help predict when a patient may be in trouble. Why is that important? If you don’t have enough nurses in critical care or even the ward, it’s difficult to cover all these patients. If the device can say, "Hey, Patrick may be having an issue and it’s going to, you need to go see him within 20 minutes on their handheld device because the algorithm can predict that that’s happening." That’s a big game changer in monitoring and ultimately in alternate sites and ultimately home. We have lots of aspirations in that area. You’ll hear more about launches coming in the future.

There are some opportunities to tidy up the portfolio, but in general, we like the product lines and the businesses there. I think the digital unlock is the margin unlock. It’s also the growth vehicle capabilities for PCS.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: For the record, Patrick’s always having issues. It seems very accurate. There’s been a few who’ve tried back home to create a CAD to predict analytics. What do you see as some of the challenges of doing that? Is it the data siloed, or that you have a certain number of steps, but then there’s another manufacturer who’s in the patient value chain there? Do you need to plug it all together? I know it sounds very vague, but we’ve heard from some companies trying to do this before and they’ve occasionally struggled to kind of end to end that patient.

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah, I think look, there’s multiple levels, but at the first level, one is the customers migrating to the cloud is probably one of the biggest unlocks. As we know, even pre-COVID, the amount of customers that even had the majority of their data in a cloud provider, and you know, outside the U.S., it’s even a much smaller population. That’s a big deal and the reliability of it. The second thing is the standards. I think, you know, FHIR now, you know, upgrading from the HL7 is playing a big role within that. I would say companies like ours that are looking more longitudinally and can be someone that can integrate even other people that we don’t compete with. I think we’ve spent a lot of time on AI inside. As you’ve probably seen, we have the largest amount of FDA-approved integrated AI tools in our products.

The next move is how do you bring more of that connected across ours and other products in a given department? How do you make that process in that given area more predictable, safer, better outcomes? There is partnering that has to take place. There has to be trust with some of the relationships. I think the enablement of cloud, some of the standards that are out there, and really where the evolution of some of the large language models and what can be integrated in, there’s a lot of things happening right now that are going to enable that.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: On the topic of AI in general, how do you separate the developments that are a requirement to compete with your peers versus the ones you get distinctively paid for? We’ve seen some that have been rapidly sort of commoditized. By contrast, we’ve also seen some that clinics have been really willing to pay for very quickly. How do you think about strategically, because AI is treated as this big monolith, but where to put your time and attention?

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: I mean, simply for us, it’s about what solves the biggest customer problem. You know, if you can solve a big customer problem that has patient issues and financial, and your solution has a better answer for the patient and solves a cost issue for the customer, it’s usually a winner. At least from that standpoint, you can really kind of have an end-to-end discussion. I think what’s limited us, and I’ll say us in many cases, device or even broader pharma, is you come in with a point solution. The problem is the savings are either downstream or upstream or the benefits there are. Being able to have the C-suite discussion, which does lead into why do we have, you hear more about enterprise deals, multi-year kind of enterprise relationships, are many cases we have these discussions that, look, here’s what we can help you do in cardiology.

Here’s what we can help you with a breast cancer strategy. The discussion really is about how you either bring more patients in, how you bring better value during that, how do you actually take cost out of the structure. To me, that’s the area, which is why we’ve really doubled down on how do you optimize to make the best device by itself with using AI? Because at the end of the day, if it really does a lot different, I can get more price or more value just for the box. I’m not having to sell the AI separately. When you move into the realm of this is a SaaS product or tool, you need to be able to talk their language, which is in this care pathway, in this value chain, how can you drive it? I would say stay tuned.

I think, you know, 2026 for us will be the first year where we start introducing more of those capabilities.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: Would you guys be open to AI software solutions that spread, and I think you actually do some of those already, but spread our modality, not modality agnostic, vendor agnostic in the sense that, because one of the challenges is an independent company with these software solutions can be applicable to any of the installments. Even though you guys are massive in some of the modalities, you know, you’re still a third, let’s call it roughly.

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: Would you be open to keep an open architecture?

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Oh, 100%. I think it depends. There’s areas where, like just take something like Air Recon DL and MR. We’re using not pixel data. We’re actually using reconstruction proprietary GE data, and we can do things there at faster capabilities that you could. That’s always going to be stayed there. When you move into the reading world, I think one has to do that because no one has an exclusive install base of just our equipment or, you know, company A, B, or C. That’s clearly a part of it. I think when you start thinking about, let’s move into monitoring or even NIC, infant care, you’re connecting with other things that have to follow standard. We think that makes sense. Obviously, the debates on how you get there, this is an industry that started DICOM and many interchanges that are out there.

I do think there’s going to be aspects of both pending on where you are in the value chain.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: On ultrasound specifically, I think anyone who’s had a kid knows that the scan takes a fraction of the time, and then the incredibly tedious rollable measurement of the spine takes like two-thirds of the entire meeting. Clearly, we’re very early on in the stage of like automatic image interpretation, measurement, those kind of things. You think you guys can get paid for that? Because it saves the system a lot of time. I’m using just one example, but particularly with ultrasound, which is a skill.

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah, no, and ultrasound is one of those modalities that, I mean, we’re a leader in. We just launched actually just a couple of weeks ago the first new big cardiology platform that anybody’s introduced in quite some time. Patrick, to your point, embedded in it are multiple, multiple different AI tools. To the point that if you’re looking in cardiology, the old days for the cardiologists that know this or folks who have used it to do a left ventricle kind of ejection fraction, you would actually drop points. You would do all this. You’d have to get the vintage of the heart. Now, fundamentally, I simplified, but getting the heart image captured, the actual device itself will get the right views. It’ll automatically do the outline.

You automatically move from what used to be a tedious outlining, getting all these views, and you’re trying to then get an ejection fraction number, which is what you want. The device itself can move right from all that to a number. I do think this is one of the interesting evolutions of quantification in radiology and cardiology. We don’t think about it much, but in EKG, a lot of people don’t spend the time reading the waveform. The algorithms are so good, and it gives you a number, or it gives you, yes, there is an issue, or yes, there is not. That’s also the progress that’s going to be happening on all these devices. Suffice to say, in OB-GYN on our Volusign product, the image quality you get out of your child now rivals what used to look like a CT many years ago.

I think that’s only going to continue to rise because we’re finding new ways with algorithms, particularly driven by AI, to be able to optimize them even more. When you add a suite of cloud-based capabilities that you can take this now in a handheld in Sub-Saharan Africa or inner city area to check for someone who may need a heart valve or has peripheral artery disease, there’s just a lot that’s happening in that space. We are super excited about that. Also, the integration ultrasound will play with other modalities like we were chatting earlier in the CAP lab or in the MR area.

Carolynne, Head of Strategy, GE HealthCare: Just quickly back to Vscan Air SL, that’s a great example of one of the MPIs we talked about at Investor Day that we expect will help drive us towards that 1% to 2% of growth over the medium term.

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah, to that point, we talked about for us, one of the big focus areas since we became public three years ago was a big influx of R&D funds. We’ve close to doubled the amount of R&D investment we’ve made since 2018. The goal is, what do you do with the money? Part of that is how do we actually make sure that we’re at parity or leadership across all the major areas? The first area coming out, proof point, is this new cardiovascular ultrasound platform. You’re going to hear more about things like FLCiO. You’re going to hear about whole body PET, vascular suites, what’s happening in monitoring. We have a really strong cycle of launches that will be coming out later this year into 2026, which will be strong growth for our orders portfolio in 2026, starting to then really drive more even faster revenue backside.

The 2027, 2028 window, as we articulated then, is full of some great new exciting products. I think, Patrick, the part that I’m excited about alongside that, we’re also advancing this departmental view of AI tools. I feel good about it. The teams have done a really fantastic job executing on the programs.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: Hopefully, you can drive some more downstream procedures for some other companies as well.

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: I think the downstream procedure world, part of this will be particularly to take vascular. I mean, one of the big issues we hear from, you know, on the heart valve side, the electrophysiology side is just getting time on in lab. Now we have a world-class CAP lab, EP capabilities. We’ll soon have vascular and also neurovascular. All of those procedures right now are growing significantly. You can’t do them if you don’t have access to a lab.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: The one sort of area that’s opaque that not enough evidence is building into is just China. Latest thoughts, I mean, it’s been a roller coaster for the entire industry trying to understand what’s going on, not long term, but more short term.

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: What are you seeing at the moment? How should we feel about China from your perspective in the next six months?

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah, so I mean, just perspective-wise, you know, 2024, that market was down double digits, I think, you know, for everybody, for a lot of reasons. The anti-corruption campaign that the Chinese government had, again, we think over the long run is a good thing, particularly for multinationals, but that had an effect. This year, a combination of tendering that just took longer to get money allocated, I think, than anybody estimated means this market will be flat to maybe slightly down some this year. What does that mean for the back half of this year? Some people are calling the market’s going to pick up. We think that it’s going to be stable, but not a significant growth play. We’ll see who’s right. Part of our estimates are all of the tendering just takes a little bit longer right now. Some of that’s procedural for whatnot.

I look forward, and you know, for us with China, we’ve been very open about this. The days of 10% growth, we don’t necessarily think are there. I think it can be a mid-single-digit growth market. If it’s a roughly flat stable market, you know, all of our midterm goals and strategies are well intact. We think it’s heading that direction. I think all indications are it’s heading that direction, but we’re not counting on it being any type of a growth vehicle for the company.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: One of the big contributions China had over the last five or 10 years was it was the source of a lot of installation expansion, you know, rather than replacement systems like a proper growth. People often think of the U.S., which is the replacement market. Is that still true? We’re just talking about all the incremental utilization of radiology. Is the U.S., if you had to guess, put it another way, what proportion of the systems that you place in the U.S. are replacement versus like greenfield new installation expansion?

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah, I mean, let me answer your question this way. It’s definitely a growth market from new sockets because, again, you just take the PET example. Every new PET system that goes to cardiology fundamentally is a brand new system. A CT scanner that’s dedicated just for heart scanning is a new system. The more that you’re actually seeing this growth of what’s happening in pulse field ablation or with heart valves, those are new sockets that in the past were just PCA or stenting. The more new procedures, yes, it’s offset by some productivity that all of us in the industry bring, but the growth is tremendous. I think in China, you’re going to continue to see growth. It’s going to be more in the Western markets as they’ve outlined. It’s a big set of folks. Even in Western Europe, we are seeing growth.

Coming out of COVID, I think we all know in Europe, bigger hospitals, more concentrated care. You have an infectious disease. You say, gee, maybe we shouldn’t send all these people to one spot. We need to do more outpatient imaging. That’s been one of the big growth drivers in the big seven within Europe, more alternate sites. You see the rise of big, let’s say, customers for us, but providers now that actually provide services for government agencies around different countries. Those tend to be big partners for us that can put equipment in, and they’re all new installs. You think of the Middle East as an example, huge amounts of growth within new institutions, Saudi, other countries like that as well.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: Yeah, to your point, you know, Italy, I know, has a lot of outpatient imaging capabilities. The U.S. as well is going that way. What’s the difference in servicing those two customer bases? Like, is it a modality difference? Is one more likely to get, I guess, inpatients more likely to be a three-terminal system maybe? I don’t know. What are the differences in servicing a, not an ASC exactly, but the sort of outpatient facility is less a big inpatient facility?

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah, I mean, it comes down to the services they’re providing. Obviously, your echo or ultrasound typically plays a big role. Mobile X-ray imaging, you know, our OEC platform is second to none. It has capabilities that even some fixed cath labs don’t have. In certain countries, that platform acts in many, many vascular procedures as well. You’re starting to see a lot of orthopedics take place that only took place in the institution. MRI imaging within centers is more and more prevalent. We see pretty much a whole fleet of that. I would say it’s less about the hardware config itself. It might be the software applications where you might be doing more sophisticated things in-house, but you actually have the same systems in an outpatient world. That gives flexibility too to move patients around depending on what’s happening in your different locations.

That’s a big topic with a lot of our IDN customers, how do I think about my fleet and optimize it based on demographics and procedure priorities.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: If I think just big picture, finish it up, if I think of Saccaro, if I think of Visional, if I think of the PDX reimbursement changes, if I think of the modality growth that you’re seeing in China sort of getting into a better spot, is there any reason that 2026 shouldn’t be a top line much better year than 2025?

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Yeah, look, you know, we’re not here to give guidance, but it’s a fair question. I think, you know, we’re building a great backlog. If you look at our backlog, we’ve got a record backlog book to bill. This combination of when that number is there, it means you’re actually bringing in more orders than sales going out the door. At some point down the road, those will go out. We feel quite good about the setup that’s coming into it. I would say as well with the new products that are launched that many of those won’t be in a position to ship until late 2026 into 2027. It should be a robust orders opportunity as well to continue to build that. Each year we’re expecting that we continue to improve. That’s our focus.

I would say as well on top of that is our focus on M&A as well. I mentioned on our last call, Patrick, that we see dislocation in the marketplace. What I mean by that is we’re starting to finally see between private equity, other publics, that values are becoming more reasonable. For us, all these items we talked about on products, there’s a lot of small talk in deals. I’m talking about in this case, $100 million, multiple hundred million dollars of deals that can plug in that give us a differentiated value across the value stream. A product by itself, someone can always have a better price, maybe a better feature. When they work together and solve that customer problem we talked about, it’s a big deal. I think that’s a really important aspect for us.

Focus on talk-ins is what you’re going to hear from us going forward.

Patrick, US MedTech Team: We’ll keep our eyes peeled. Carolynne, thank you so much.

Carolynne, Head of Strategy, GE HealthCare: Thank you.

Peter, CEO, GE HealthCare: Thanks, guys. Thank you. Appreciate it.

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