Microsoft and General Electric Announce More Joint Venture Plans

Today, Microsoft announced more details on its plans to form a 50-50 joint venture with General Electric Co. (GE), through its healthcare IT business.

The two companies unveiled their intent to showcase future product capabilities at HIMSS12, the largest healthcare IT trade show of the year, set to take place later this month.

The new joint venture will be called Caradigm and is expected to be launched in the first half of the year.

The new entity will be aimed mainly at enabling health systems and professionals to use real-time, systemwide intelligence for the delivery of better healthcare quality.

The new company will be focused on the development of open, interoperable technology platform and collaborative clinical applications that will deliver better population health management, thus improving health and wellness.

“We have an exciting opportunity to transform healthcare globally with an established open platform and a new generation of applications focused on population health,” CEO-designate Michael Simpson said.

“Around the world, delivery system reforms and payment model changes are requiring healthcare providers to integrate data across silos of care delivery to enable better care coordination and performance improvement. We’re founding Caradigm to meet the changing needs of health and healthcare across the globe.”

Each of the two companies will bring to the venture its own expertise and 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
GE Healthcare Qualibria, a clinical knowledge application environment being developed in cooperation with Intermountain Healthcare (Salt Lake City) and the Mayo Clinic

At this month’s HIMSS12 conference in Las Vegas, GE Healthcare and Microsoft plan to demonstrate future product capabilities expected to become available from Caradigm.

These demonstrations will take place both in the GE Healthcare (No. 2635) booth and in Microsoft’s (No. 1629) booth. On Tuesday, Feb. 21, from 6–7:30 p.m. in Room 101, Sands Expo Convention Center, Caradigm’s future leadership team will meet the press and analysts.