Bits Blog: G.E.-Microsoft Venture to Create ‘Windows’ for Health Care

Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

Any discussion of the challenge of trying to improve health care and curb costs with computer technology quickly turns to “silos.” Not the kind that store corn in Midwestern farms, obviously.

Information technology in health care is as fragmented and balkanized as the health care system itself. The technology silos in health care lead to two afflictions — captive patient and medical information, and the inefficiency of having to tailor code and programs for a bunch of proprietary software systems.

General Electric and Microsoft are announcing a joint venture on Thursday intended to attack the silos. The venture will borrow from a familiar playbook. “This industry needs a Windows-like platform,” said Peter Neupert, the head of Microsoft’s health solutions group.

His comment is corporately self-referential, to be sure. But what he means is something like a software operating system that standardizes many of the underlying tasks of running computer programs. The “platform” layer takes care of the computer plumbing, so software developers can focus their efforts on the layer above that — on applications.

That, in turn, can spur innovation and an ecosystem of developers and companies who build on top of the platform. That’s what Microsoft did so successfully with the personal computer. And it is what Apple, in particular, has done so well with smartphone and tablet software.

The G.E.-Microsoft venture hopes to lay the foundation for a surge in software applications that tackle rising costs and quality lapses in health care. “It is the developer community that is going to solve these problems,” said Michael J. Simpson, the G.E. executive who will be chief executive of the joint venture, which will be a new company. (Mr. Neupert, who plans to retire, will not join the new company.)

The new company is not yet named, but its headquarters will be near the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash. When it gets up and running next year, the company, Mr. Simpson said, should have about about 750 workers, recruits from Microsoft, G.E. and elsewhere. “This is a big bet,” he said.

It is a bet focused initially on big health care providers — hospitals and large physician groups. The new company will fold together health products from Microsoft including Amalga, its software for pulling lab test, radiology and other data in real-time into a patient’s electronic health record for diagnoses. G.E.’s contributions include Qualibria, advanced clinical knowledge software being developed in cooperation with two big providers, Intermountain Healthcare and Mayo Clinic.

Mayo Clinic, a customer of both G.E. and Microsoft, provided the initial prod to put their technologies together. The joint venture talks got under way in earnest five months ago with a meeting between Jeffrey R. Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, and his counterpart at Microsoft, Steven A. Ballmer. (The two have know each other since they were assistant product managers for Procter Gamble in the late 1970s.)

The new company will develop software that makes it easier to monitor and manage the health of not only individual patients, but also entire populations of patients with chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes.

Next year, the company plans will introduce tools to make it easier for independent software developers to build applications that run on its platform technology.

The Windows analogy is intriguing, but it also may prove to be misleading. The PC business was a young industry when Microsoft rose to power. By contrast, there are several established health care software vendors likely to resist the G.E.-Microsoft strategy. Don’t expect Epic or Cerner, for example, to rush to build applications that run on the G.E.-Microsoft platform.

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