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Amidst a flurry of good economic news coming out of Brazil in recent days, GE Healthcare added its own boost — inaugurating its first factory in South America in Contagem, Brazil. News of the plant, which will serve both the local market of Brazil and eventually become an export hub for all of Latin America, comes as a new United Nations report on the region expects the economy of Latin America and the Caribbean to expand “by 5.2 percent in 2010, up exponentially from a previous view of 4.1 percent,” Reuters reports, adding that “the body sees the economy of Brazil, the region’s biggest, soaring 7.6 percent in 2010 and 4.5 percent in 2011.” In the video clip below, Mark Vachon, President and CEO of GE Healthcare Americas, provides an overivew of what the new GE plant will be producing and why Brazil was chosen.

Our story on Friday about the dramatic ways in which “design thinking” is helping to transform healthcare underscored a critically important side of GE’s healthymagination strategy — that it’s not just technology that will solve problems, but new attitudes and behaviors. That same low-tech march to solutions can be seen in the work of Dr. Olajide Williams, a neurologist and Columbia University professor who is the founder and director of the Hip Hop Public Health Education Center at Harlem Hospital. His team produces a series of health awareness programs that use hip-hop music to teach pre-adolescents about issues such as eating healthy, warning signs of strokes, and preventing Type 2 diabetes. As you can see in the video below, the center — whose sponsors include GE, the New York City Council and the National Stroke Association — recently hosted hundreds of students from New York City public schools for a program called H.E.A.L.S. (Healthy Eating and Living in Schools) at the famed Apollo Theater in Harlem.

Edible antennae, Wi-Fi enabled bathroom scales, and insect decals in Dutch urinals at first may not seem to be part of the revolution in healthcare, but at GE’s recent healthymagination summit in New York, Tim Brown, president and CEO of design and innovation consulting firm IDEO, artfully weaved them into the mix. The event brought together thought leaders on the subject of how information technology in particular is making hospitals and doctors more efficient and patients safer — and Tim’s talk centered on what he calls “designing for behavior change.” It’s all about taking lessons learned from the world of design and applying it to the healthcare space so that small lifestyle changes, often fueled by new technologies, can have enormously positive results when it comes to improving health. In the clip below, Tim dives into two of the four principles that he says are key to individuals taking control of their own health: self-measurement and the need to balance impulsive behaviors.

As we described in our story about the healthymagination hospital efficiency summit last week, healthcare IT is transforming medicine by giving doctors measurable new ways to be more efficient, standardize care, and reduce errors. One of the technologies at the heart of this transformation is what’s known as Electronic Medical Records, or EMRs. These computerized systems, which create comprehensive digital patient records, do more than simply replace a doctor’s paper chart. They can check for drug interactions, flag health protocols when it comes to procedures and health maintenance, and they track a patient’s condition over time. But for doctors working on their own, such as family practitioners, the time it takes to learn a new system and manage it, combined with the cost of the technology itself, can sometimes be an obstacle to making the high-tech leap. Today, GE Healthcare announced an addition to its EMR line-up that is web-based and specifically designed for smaller practices — making it easy to install, use and maintain.

In the world of doctors and nurses, the term “performance solutions” is all about finding rigorous, measurable new ways to be more efficient, standardize care, reduce errors, and drive continuous improvement by tapping into, and learning from, the volumes of data that are produced daily in treatment settings. The result can be lower costs, better deployment of critical resources, and a chance to treat more patients. For the patient, it simply means better, safer care. As seen in the video below, those big themes were the subject of a daylong healthymagination thought leadership summit on hospital efficiency in New York City yesterday that featured a range of speakers and panel discussions on everything from the role of technology to how to foster cultural shifts in hospitals. As GE Healthcare CEO John Dineen told the audience: “A lot of the discussion has really been on the challenges and the problems — on the worst examples in healthcare and the bottom 10 percent. We want to flip that a little bit. We want to have a more optimistic discussion and we want to introduce you to what we believe is the top 10 percent — the aspirational leaders in the healthcare industry with some of the ideas and technologies that are being put to use to make healthcare better.”