General Electric and Microsoft forge health JV

Beverley Head
Friday, 09 December 2011 08:59

IT Industry - Strategy

A new 50:50 joint venture is being established by General Electric and Microsoft to pool their talents in order to go after the ballooning healthcare IT market. Due to go live in the first half of next year, the as yet un-named venture mirrors GE's arrangement with Intel in aged care.

Intended as a global initiative the GE/Microsoft company will seek to capitalise on the fast growing demand for health information systems. In Australia, according to analyst Ovum, the healthcare sector was expected to invest $1.5 billion in healthcare IT this year - but that is expected to rise swiftly to $2.1 billion by 2016.

The core intellectual property that will be tipped into the new joint venture includes Microsoft Amalga, an enterprise health intelligence platform; Microsoft Vergence, a single sign-on and context management solution; Microsoft expreSSO, an enterprise single sign-on solution; GE Healthcare eHealth, a health information exchange; and GE Healthcare Qualibria, a clinical knowledge application environment being developed in cooperation with Intermountain Healthcare and Mayo Clinic.

While the companies will continue to sell solutions independently to healthcare providers, they will work together in the joint venture to develop what is described as 'an open, interoperable technology platform.'

Details of how much money each company will contribute has not been revealed - but if the GE/Intel joint venture is any guide substantial investment can be expected from both sides.  Care Innovations, the GE/Intel joint venture focussed on aged care technology has been funded with a total of $US100 million funnelled to seed the new business.

The GE/Microsoft joint venture will be headquartered near Microsoft's head office in Redmond in the US. Michael Simpson the vice president and general manager at GE Healthcare IT, will serve as the company's CEO.