Microsoft and GE Healthcare to Create New Joint Venture to Enable Better Population Health Management

I am pleased to share that Microsoft and GE Healthcare have just announced an exciting new initiative aimed at improving healthcare quality and the patient experience. The two companies are creating a joint venture that will combine Microsoft’s deep expertise in building platforms and ecosystems with GE Healthcare’s experience in clinical and administrative workflow solutions. The new venture, which is pending regulatory approval and has yet to be named, will develop and market an open, interoperable technology platform and next-generation clinical applications that will help enable better population health management. The new company will be headquartered near the Microsoft campus in Redmond, WA.

In addition to the new joint venture, GE Healthcare and Microsoft will each maintain a strong presence in the healthcare IT industry, and will continue to sell their own products and services to healthcare organizations around the globe. Healthcare is one of our fastest-growing business segments – Microsoft has over 160,000 healthcare customers worldwide, and over 20,000 partners selling a broad portfolio of solutions on Microsoft technologies. We are more committed than ever to our healthcare customers and partners, and view this new joint venture as a great addition to our ongoing efforts.

Microsoft HealthVault will remain at Microsoft as a cloud-based service. The new company will join other ISVs in building applications that connect to, and leverage, Microsoft HealthVault.

Microsoft and GE Healthcare bring complementary expertise to this new venture and will contribute intellectual property, including:

· 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 (HIE)

· GE Healthcare Qualibria, a clinical knowledge application environment

The joint venture’s foundational offering of an open technological platform will also enable application developers to build customized, differentiated solutions that interact to meet customers’ specific needs. By enabling independent software vendors, system integrators and healthcare IT pros to develop on a common platform, the joint venture aims to support a robust ecosystem of partners that offers customers real choice.

The respective divisions of both GE Healthcare and Microsoft will continue to operate independently until the new company is formed which is expected to take place in the first half of 2012.

Posted Nate McLemore
General Manager, Microsoft Health Solutions Group

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