Microsoft, GE Join to Create New Healthcare Products Venture

Maybe they didn’t know just how hard it would be. But Microsoft, which originally tried to introduce healthcare products into the marketplace solo, is now joining with General Electric to get a little more help.

Microsoft announced yesterday that it is spinning off its little-known healthcare products unit into a new joint venture with General Electric, Matt Rosoff writes at BusinessInsider.com.

The companies, which announced the venture Wednesday night, said it will build "a wide range of IT products," – both hardware and software -- for the healthcare industry, according to Rosoff. He adds that the new company will be located near Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Washington, and employ about 750 people there, as GeekWire initially reported.

Though you wouldn’t know it, Microsoft has been in this business for more than five years now, starting when it acquired a healthcare software platform called Azyxxi developed in a hospital in Washington, D.C. Azyxxi was designed by doctors for doctors in one of the country’s busiest hospitals, and was created by Craig Feied, M.D., Mark Smith, M.D., and Fidrik Iskandar using Microsoft development tools, according to the press release announcing the venture. The press release noted that the software brings together patient data from hundreds of sources and makes them instantly available at the point of care.

Microsoft later acquired products two other companies, Sentillion and a Thai company called Global Care Solutions, to create an online storage service for patient data called HealthVault, (software that lets users organize, store, and share health information online), according to Rosoff. In 2008 all of these products were consolidated under the Amalga brand, Rosoff reports.

All the products will now be part of the new company.

In launching its healthcare solutions originally, Microsoft noted in a press release that “the same devices that keep (us) in touch with friends and family are often the devices (we) use to access the applications and services that support them at work.” The company added that, for IT departments, it’s imperative that this information must be managed, supported, and kept secure on a wide variety of user-chosen devices.