Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly, theCube co-hosts, interviewed Jan De Witte, President and CEO of Healthcare IT for GE, at the GE Industrial Internet event, Innovation Day, in San Francisco.

De Witte’s unit is part of GE Healthcare, providing IT with healthcare systems, workflow solutions, analytics, etc and the discussion was primarily focused on the healthcare workflow and very specific medical issues and needs.

Vellante asked how was the healthcare transforming, and De Witte explained that the industry was going through a lot of pressure, especially with the reimbursements going down. Like any industry, there has always been the pressure to drive end-quality, but now a new pressure has been added: productivity.

Pressure to evolve

From an IT perspective, the last decade saw a lot of money being spent on digitizing many of the processes in healthcare. Today’s trend is to drive interoperability, analytics and workflow productivity. The industrial internet is going to enable developers cater to those productivity and care quality needs.

The pressure on healthcare is big everywhere in the world, due to the increase in the population number and the longer life spans of the individuals. The society can’t keep up with the rising costs. Outside US, many European countries run more integrated healthcare systems, a trend that is catching up in the States. Lack of integration leads to lots of duplication in healthcare, says De Witte.

So, is the integrated approach a mandate to drive productivity? asked Vellante. De Witte seems to think so. Healthcare is about the process of tracking a patient data from sickness to health. Until not so long ago, the industry perceived that as a sum of activities, instead of focusing on tracking the patient. Tracking the patient generates a process and the ability to see the information at an early stage and even the ability to prevent sickness in future patients. “Information technology in this industry is going to be a game-changer,” vouches De Witte.

See his entire segment below.