2 tech leaders create health joint venture: Intel, GE partnership

Intel and GE will combine the assets of GE Healthcare’s Home Health division and Intel’s Digital Health Group to form a 50-50 joint venture.

Pending regulatory and other customary closing conditions, the joint venture is expected to become operational by the end of the year. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The venture builds on the GE-Intel health care alliance announced in 4/09 around independent living and chronic disease management.

Once formed, the new company will develop and market products, services, and technologies that promote healthy, independent living at home and in assisted-living communities around the world. It will focus on three major segments: chronic disease management, independent living and assistive technologies.

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

Click here for more details on the Intel and GE health care joint venture are available from the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal.

(Thanks to our featured blog "Heavy Doses" for sharing this. Click their link in the right-hand column under "Other Health, Science, and Technology Blogs.)

1st ultra-portable ECG machine developed and launched in India: the GE MAC 400

GE has tapped a pool of inexpensive expertise to target Indian hospitals and clinics that cannot afford its equipment designed for the U.S.

The pride on Ashish Shah’s face is unmistakable as he opens a white carton lying on the conference room table. General manager for GE Healthcare’s Technology Organization in India, Shah pulls out a contraption — slightly bigger than a landline phone, but a lot less complicated with far fewer buttons. This is the world’s first ultra-portable electrocardiogram (ECG) machine: the MAC 400.

GE Healthcare has used Indian software engineers to develop an electrocardiograph that costs les than $1,000, one-tenth the standard models used in the past. GE hopes to sell the technology in the U.S. eventually and elsewhere.

"In India we have the engineers that have the brainpower and the bandwidth to deliver on these types of projects," said V. Raja, chief executive of GE Healthcare's business in India.  They are clearly thinking of shifting the gravity to where growth is — focusing on resource-rich and people-rich countries.

GE has realized that there is a big gap between what it has traditionally got out of this market vis-a-vis what it could potentially get.

The focus on India, in a sense, is also pre-emptive. If GE doesn’t solve India’s problems, local companies will.

Adds Raja, “We see MNCs and local companies scaling the kind of revenues they get here and we think, ‘Why we can’t be an L&T, a Bharti-Airtel, or a Nokia?’ That’s clearly dawned on us.”
Click here to read more about the MAC 400 and other GE initiatives.  

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At STINSON Brand Innovation, we are expanding our health, science, and technology branding work into India through a collaboration with BrandCare, a leading pharma brand management agency based in Mumbai.

You can also read more about STINSON Brand Innovation and our international branding assignments in the “Global Issue” of our Accelerate newsletter. 

GE Healthcare mirrors the magic of its RSNA presence with real-time interactive features.

Creating a successful event website is about bringing the immediacy of real-world brand experiences to life online.

Click here for more information about GE Healthcare and the RSNA conference.

The annual RSNA conference attracts potential diagnostic imaging customers from around the globe. And it’s an important event for the GE Healthcare brand (80-90% of the company participates).

To make sure its employees and customers stayed connected, the company peppered its website with Twitter, blogs and custom-built features that catered to attendees’ individual needs.

“We wanted to take advantage of what’s going on in social media and decided to put a lot of different components into the site that would cause people to join the conversation,” according to Jim Salinsky, marketing communications manager at GE Healthcare, in EVENT MARKETER. Salinsky would tweet real-time interviews he conducted on the show floor and breaking news to transport the live experience online. “People that couldn’t come to the show said they could experience it just like anybody else by visiting the website.”

The company also allowed customers to customize their show experience both on- and offline. Via its On The Show Floor interactive map, customers could zoom in on specific product areas to pick and choose what products they wanted to learn more about.

Customers unable to visit the booth could still take a deep dive into product features while customers at the show could print a hardcopy to make better use of their time at the booth. Customers could also personalize their experience by selecting the My RSNA feature. Users created a profile then added products to their page and, for those going to the live event, scheduled sessions to attend during the show.

The 2008 RSNA website saw triple the traffic compared to previous years. Before and during the event, the website received about 2,000 page views per day. In the first two months the site was live it generated more than 31,500 page views. The website is still being used to give potential customers access to product information.

Next month, more than 650 health, science, and technology companies will exhibit at the RSNA 2009 meeting to be held November 26 to December 4 at McCormick Place in Chicago.