FACTBOX: Five facts about GE's healthcare arm

(Reuters) - General Electric Co's Healthcare business is best known for making big-ticket medical devices such as CT-scan and magnetic resonance imaging machines. But the business has operations far beyond that.

Below are five facts about GE Healthcare:

* GE Healthcare last year earned $2.85 billion on $17.39 billion in revenue. Profit was down 21 percent through the first nine months of 2009, following three consecutive years of declines as lower rates of reimbursement for imaging procedures in the United States have softened demand for the equipment.

* Beyond selling high-tech scanning devices, GE's health businesses range from advising hospitals on operating more efficiently, to making devices that assisted-living facilities use to make sure residents have not fallen in their rooms, to systems that use radio-frequency identification tags to help hospitals track the whereabouts of equipment and patients.

* Based in Chalfont St Giles, in England, the unit employs 46,000 people worldwide.

* GE plans to invest $6 billion by 2015 in a "Healthymagination" push that aims to cut by 15 percent the cost of using its medical devices.

* With emerging markets representing the company's best current growth potential, GE executives are focusing on developing lower-cost devices that will appeal to hospitals with smaller budgets -- an approach that GE Chief Executive Jeff Immelt calls the "50 percent solution at a 15 percent price."

(Reporting by Scott Malone, editing by Claudia Parsons)