Corporate Travel Medicine—Priorities & Models - Panel Discussion, April 27, 2000

Vincent Kerr, MD, Medical Director, Health Care Plans, General Electric Company

DR. LIESE: The next speakers are the team from General Electric, Dr. Vincent Kerr, and Beverly Doran. Dr. Kerr is a Corporate Medical Director of General Electric. Like Jack Welch, he has a degree from Harvard. It seems the Harvard mafia is widely distributed. And I will give the floor to you.

DR. KERR: That is great. We will try to make up some time. I wanted to thank you and your colleagues at the World Bank really for hosting this, and the invitation to us personally. I think this is a much needed seminar and also for doing it in such pleasant surroundings.

Secondly, I want to know who does your flip charts because I want that person for my meetings.

[LAUGHTER]

They are the most beautiful flip charts I have ever seen.

I will start off by saying at GE we are not where we want to be. Once again, a picture of GE, I think part of our challenge comes from both the size and pace of growth in this company. We are made up of eleven businesses, all of which would be Fortune 100; some Fortune 50 companies if split off and run on their own.

And when you look at those, the range of things that we make or the kinds of services we offer span quite a spectrum. The growth in international travel has been rapid over the last five years. If you go back five to six years, only about 10 percent or so of our revenue was coming from international operations; it is now 43 percent and continues to grow. That is going to go up.

And similarly, about a same percentage of our employees are based outside of the U.S. So, we are truly becoming I think what you would have to call a global company. That has had an impact on travel.

And what we have seen over the last couple of years is that U.S. based international travel volume has doubled. We are up to 300 ticketed segments everyday. And it is important to recognize that while that is only about 10 or 15 percent of all travel, but still it is the fastest growing segment.

Our executives are in the million mile frequent flyer club, many in several. They often donate their miles. So, there are people who have tons of travel exposure and experience.

In addition to that, we have about 1,800 to 2,000 expatriates, people who are doing assignments that may last from two to four years overseas or in another country other than their home country. And that number has actually decreased. As we have grown, we have added new challenges to running businesses.

We found that the risk isn't so much one of failure in terms of poor job performance or not being able to retain people—we do a pretty good job of that—the bigger risk is that they will be rated and taken to another company to do something, not that they will burn out or fail at the job. We have had amazingly few of those over the past several years with all this growth. And I think part of it is because there is choice involved. People elect these assignments. They are not offered them unless they have proven themselves in some ways. And upfront they know what the travel demands are going to be.

So, it is a contract that essentially they agree to take on. They may not be completely informed about everything that is involved in either taking an expat assignment or taking a job that has 50 or 75 percent international travel attached to it, but, by and large, they are. And so, there end up being few misses because I think the values of employees match the demands of the job pretty well. And that is without medical pre-screening.

There is a changing traveler in all of this growth. It is not just the execs, but it is people at many levels throughout the organization including sales and service people who do a ton of travel. When you install power generating plants somewhere around the world or service them, there are technical people, blue collar people who are suddenly going off to the outer regions of China to work on a turbine. So, it is a wide demographic range in terms of the needs of people we have to meet.

And one piece of the travel that has grown that is interesting is also the corporate jet stuff. We have added two huge jets, 757 size, but that is really to have the capacity to travel basically halfway around the world without having to make a stop for the people who want to do that.

And I mention what the U.S. travel segments were. If you look at non-U.S. country to another non-U.S. country, we have over 120,000 of those segments booked annually. So, a key issue for us is really just identifying the travelers and making sure they have basic preparation for their travel. And once again, this is focusing on international travel.

I am just going to skip over this slide. We are in 40 countries. This was I think done the beginning of the fourth quarter, and we are probably 10 percent greater than that now. We acquire two businesses a week. And so, it is actually hard to keep up with the numbers. So, I would guess at the outside of the U.S. it is about 10 percent higher than those figures are now.

We have business operations in 40 countries, but people in many more countries than that, small groups of people.

So, when you look at how we have had to kind of organize to meet our travel challenges, identifying the traveler really depends on knowing in advance they are making the reservation. We are helped in part by the fact that all of GE's travel goes through basically three travel centers, the largest one being in Phoenix, Arizona, and you are required to make your reservations through there. So, they are actually able to identify the traveler. That is the good news.

The bad news part of the story is they use the Saber reservation system which relies on a dumb terminal and a program that runs somewhere else. So, when you try to build functionality into that, you have a problem. You would think you would be able to get real time notice of anyone booking a trip. That has actually taken us a while to be able to program that in, given the system that existed.

Once we know, we have 95 GE-owned clinics in the U.S. These are clinics that are located at manufacturing facilities primarily, as well as a number of U.S.-approved clinics who do travel prep and travel immunizations. What pulls all of that together is something we call our international travel readiness team, which Bev Doran, who is here—when you are at the bottom of the ninth and batting clean-up, you need Mark McGuire—she is going to be the Mark McGuire of travel for this pitch.

But it pulls it together in terms of having the standardization for what we do and knowing what we do.

Our Achilles' heel is once again information, because often when we immunize people, that goes into individual medical records, maybe in a paper record in a clinic. And where we want to go with this, if we really want to serve the traveler well, is making this a smart system so that they get e-mails in a timely fashion that are unique to them and tell them what they need to do, things that they can orient their actions around as opposed to just having a broad-base of information.

Our people respond to that kind of stuff in a bigger way. In addition to that, we have some internationally approved clinics and another 100 clinics that are scattered at manufacturing locations around the world. And that is in a shaded box because that is highly variable. A clinic in China or in India may not be equipped to prepare someone who is going on an assignment somewhere else. So, we have to rely on international clinics to do that.

Now looking forward, we would love to be able to employ that resource in this way. So, those are some of the challenges. Bev, I am going to bring you up to talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of how we have taking on identifying and preparing people.

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