GE Healthcare to Shutter Maryland Plant, Nearly 200 Employees Affected
February 7, 2017
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff
BALTIMORE – GE Healthcare is planning to close a facility in Laurel, Maryland affecting approximately 200 positions. The facility is being shut down as part of an effort to streamline operations in order to stay competitive, the Baltimore Sun reported.
The company said it will shift many of the positions to a Wisconsin facility, but allow about 20 employees to continue working remotely in Maryland. While the Maryland facility will be closing, a GE Healthcare spokesperson told the Sun that it anticipates hiring to be ramped up at the Wisconsin site.
"By consolidating business operations and engineering in larger, existing locations in Wisconsin, we will be more customer-centric, more competitive from a cost perspective, and enhance our technical domain expertise and platforming knowledge by collaborating more closely with the rest of the business' engineering organization," Benjamin Fox, a GE Healthcare spokesperson told the Sun.
Fox also told the Sun that shifting the work from Maryland to Wisconsin would benefit the company’s supply chain efforts, as the products would be shipped from one facility, rather than multiple ones.
The Maryland facility manufactures incubators and warmers for neonatal intensive care units. GE Healthcare’s facilities in Wisconsin, which are near to the metropolitan area of Milwaukee, develop and manufacture medical imaging equipment, according to the Milwaukee Business Journal. GE Healthcare employs approximately 6,000 people in Wisconsin.
The closing of the facility is expected to take approximately 12 to 24 months, the Sun said. Fox told the Sun that employees who will lose their jobs will be offered "income extension" and "other benefits” to help them during the transition.
GE Healthcare develops medical imaging, software & IT, patient monitoring and diagnostics tools. Additionally, the company is involved in drug discovery, biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies and performance improvement solutions.
In June 2016, GE Healthcare opened a new 210,000 square-foot drug development facility in Massachusetts that the company says will employ more than 500 people when the precision medicine facility is operating at full capacity later this year. The site is home to 40,000 square feet of laboratories supporting cell and immune therapy research and development, early stage drug development, biomanufacturing.
GE Healthcare closed out 2016 with FDA clearance of the Molecular Breast Imaging (MBI) localization accessory for breast biopsy. The Discovery NM 750b breast imaging system is designed to measure and image the distribution of selected single photon emission radioisotopes in the human body to aid in the evaluation of lesions.