GE Healthcare and National Rural Health Association Partner to Improve Rural Access to Healthcare Education

Program to Benefit Underserved Professionals and Patients in America Announced at Annual Conference of State Legislatures.

DENVER -- General Electric Company (NYSE: GE) A new program announced today by GE Healthcare and the National Rural Health Association (NRHA) will provide healthcare professionals and patients in rural-area hospitals across the United States with better access to high-quality healthcare education.

“Grant-in-Aid Partnership,” a joint venture of GE Healthcare, a unit of General Electric Company (NYSE:GE), and the NRHA, an organization dedicated to improving the health and health care of rural Americans, will enable hospitals who are members of the NRHA to provide educational programs for their patients and staff via GE satellite TV for a fraction of the standard cost.

The announcement was made today during the National Conference of State Legislatures’ annual meeting in Denver, Colorado. A portion of this conference, which brings together state legislators from all over the country, is focused on exploring ways to improve rural healthcare in the United States.

“Working with NRHA, we designed this program to address some of the economic challenges currently facing rural hospitals, and their need to increase educational opportunities for staff and patients despite tightening budgets and reduced resources,” said Dave Ross, GE Healthcare’s Manager of Education Products and Services.

NRHA’s members include more than 500 U.S. hospitals, all of which will qualify for the program. Each participating hospital will be equipped with two GE satellite TV channels that carry educational programming from GE Healthcare and other education providers – Tip TV for the hospital staff and The Patient Channel for hospital patients. The NRHA will administer the program, while GE will provide the equipment, programming content, and user tools necessary to bring high quality training programs and patient education to the participating hospitals.

“The Grant-in-Aid Partnership should enable rural healthcare practitioners to stay current with the latest developments in patient care without taking time away from their work or incurring the often high costs of attending off-site educational events,” said D. David Sniff, FACHE, NRHA President. “In addition, the patient programming will complement staff efforts to help patients understand their medical conditions and improve their health.”

Training in Partnership Television (TiP-TV™). The nation’s largest health information network, TiP-TV offers hundreds of accredited courses for doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals to improve their skills and knowledge of developments in their field. The educational content comes from luminary academic institutions and government agencies as well as GE’s continuing education programming. “TiP-TV enables a facility that may be geographically distant from top-tier educational opportunities to access the best practices of the country’s leading healthcare providers and educators,” said Ross.

The Patient Channel®. This channel transmits patient education programming 24 hours a day to televisions throughout a facility in patient rooms, waiting areas and other venues. Program content focuses on information about common chronic diseases, conditions and care topics, such as smoking cessation, cancer, diabetes, patient safety, taking medications, and nutrition.

“Television is the perfect medium to inform patients and model healthy behaviors. Our programs are filmed documentary style with real patients and their physicians so viewers feel they are learning along with the patients in the video. They get practical advice and actionable tips on how to integrate good healthcare practices into their lives,” said Ross.

The current annual value of both channels is $20,000 per year, including programming and satellite installation. Because of the Grant-in-Aid Partnership program, qualifying hospitals will pay GE Healthcare only $3000 per year to cover the cost of providing, installing and maintaining the satellite equipment.

In addition, GE will provide tools and training to help the hospitals optimize awareness of and participation in the educational programming. Hospitals also will be able to use GE’s online Healthcare Learning System to administer staff continuing education credits at no charge.

Over the two-year duration of the grant period, GE will contribute nearly $35,000 worth of educational resources to each participating hospital.

Program participation is limited to critical access hospitals and rural hospitals that are members in good standing of the NRHA and their State Rural Health Association and located in counties designated in the List of Rural Counties and Designated Eligible Zip Codes in Metropolitan Counties, published by the federal government. Enrollment will be accepted through December 31, 2004.

“Education is and always will be a key component of quality healthcare,” said Sniff. “For patients, the Grant-in-Aid Partnership program will provide programs that will improve their health and quality of life. For caregivers, it will provide the training required to stay abreast of the ever-changing procedures and technologies in healthcare today.”

About The National Rural Health Association:
The National Rural Health Association is a national membership organization, whose mission is to improve the health and well-being of rural Americans and to provide leadership on rural issues through advocacy, communications, education and research. The NRHA is a non-profit association.

About GE Healthcare
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform and treat disease, so their patients can live their lives to the fullest.

GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases, and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $15 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 43,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries.

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