Date: 5th Aug 2010

GE and Intel to create a new healthcare company

GE and Intel have agreed to form 50/50 joint venture company to create a new healthcare company by combining assets of GE Healthcare's Home Health division and Intel's Digital Health Group, and will be owned equally by GE and Intel. The key market for this new company is aging population and also mid-age people suffering from chronic health concerns.

The multinational joint GE is the top-ranked vendor developing medical electronics equipments. GE has a team of engineers working in India to design medical electronics equipments for emerging economies. For Intel it's the strategy to tap the global market at grassroot level.

In medical electronics domain other than the sensing of patient's health parameters there is lot of processing and communication requirements. This opportunity creates new market for telecom and processor focused semiconductor makers. In a conference event when GE had announced portable ECG equipment which looked like a notebook computer later Freescale Semiconductor had announced ECG on a chip, clearly indicating lot can be done in the chips itself. With million of people suffering from chronic diseases there is volume demand for medical equipments which signals the viability for SoC chips for Medical equipments.

So trends such as these clearly indicates much of the work can be done at chip level itself for medical application domain. That's the reason the semiconductor vendors are ready to play to increasing role in medical domain.

The new unnamed company to develop products, services and technologies to monitor health of people inside their homes and offices. Intel says new company will focus on three major segments: chronic disease management, independent living and assistive technologies. GE Healthcare and Intel will contribute assets in remote patient monitoring, independent living concepts and assistive technologies, such as the Intel Health Guide, Intel Reader and GE Healthcare's QuietCare.

The new company will have headquarters in the greater Sacramento, California area. Louis Burns, currently vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Health Group, will be CEO of the new company, and Omar Ishrak, senior vice president of GE and president and CEO, GE Healthcare Systems, will be chairman of the board.