Intel and GE form healthcare joint venture, sluggish Atom-powered home servants on the way
By Darren Murph 
posted August 4th 2010 6:13AM
posted August 4th 2010 6:13AM
GE, Intel to Form New Healthcare Joint Venture
Company to Focus on Telehealth and Independent Living in Effort to Tackle Increasing Global Burden of Chronic Disease and Age-Related Conditions
SANTA CLARA, Calif. & FAIRFIELD, Conn.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--GE (NYSE: GE) and Intel Corporation have announced the entry into a definitive agreement to form a 50/50 joint venture to create a new healthcare company focused on telehealth and independent living. The new company will be formed 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. 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.
"We must rethink models of care that go beyond hospital and clinic visits, to home and community-based care models that allow for prevention, early detection, behavior change and social support. The creation of this new company is aimed at accelerating just that."
The venture builds on the GE-Intel healthcare alliance announced in April 2009 around independent living and chronic disease management. GE and Intel share a common vision to use technology to bring more effective healthcare into millions of homes and to improve the lives of seniors and people with chronic conditions. With the dramatic increase of people living with chronic conditions, and a global aging population, there is a need to find new models of healthcare delivery and extend care to the home and other residential settings.
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. 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®.
"New models of care delivery are required to address some of the largest issues facing society today, including our aging population, increasing healthcare costs and a large number of people living with chronic conditions," said Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini. "We must rethink models of care that go beyond hospital and clinic visits, to home and community-based care models that allow for prevention, early detection, behavior change and social support. The creation of this new company is aimed at accelerating just that."
GE Chairman of the Board and CEO Jeff Immelt said "Controlling healthcare costs while bringing quality care to an increasingly aging population is one of the largest global challenges we face today. We think this joint venture will offer great potential to address these challenges by improving the quality of life for millions while lowering healthcare costs through new technology. This new company is the next step forward in a healthcare partnership that combines the complementary expertise and capabilities of GE and Intel to accelerate the development of innovative home health technology."
Under the terms of the agreement, the new company will combine an experienced team, home health assets, technology development, products, sales and marketing. With the combined talent, capabilities and capital sharing, the new company will also provide the focus required to speed innovation and delivery of products to market.
The new company will have headquarters in the greater Sacramento, Calif. 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.
About GE Healthcare:
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our broad expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, drug discovery, biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies, performance improvement and performance solutions services help our customers to deliver better care to more people around the world at a lower cost. In addition, we partner with healthcare leaders, striving to leverage the global policy change necessary to implement a successful shift to sustainable healthcare systems.
Our "healthymagination" vision for the future invites the world to join us on our journey as we continuously develop innovations focused on reducing costs, increasing access and improving quality and efficiency around the world. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $16 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 46,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at www.gehealthcare.com/quietcare.
For our latest news, please visit http://newsroom.gehealthcare.com
About Intel
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is a world leader in computing innovation. The company designs and builds the essential technologies that serve as the foundation for the world's computing devices. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom and blogs.intel.com.
To learn more about Intel in health care, visit www.intel.com/healthcare.
If the old dear in the picture really needed to use some Atom powered health device, she wouldn't look anywhere near that happy. (Take your pick if I'm referring to the use of an Atom powered gadget or needing to use a health monitoring device).
@Sheldon
The new Intel Atom N550 is a fantastic processor for light duty use. Extremely power efficient and produces next to no heat so can be put in very thin devices. Its not like it needs to play Crysis.
Its not like they are using a weak ARM A8 (aka Apple A4, same thing) like in the iPad, which is completed dominated even by a N450 Atom:
"Languishing across all of the JavaScript benchmarks, the ARM Cortex-A8 was only one-third to one-half as fast as the x86 competition. However, this might partially be a result of the very slow memory subsystem that burdened the ARM core.
More troubling is the unacceptably poor double-precision floating-point throughput of the ARM Cortex-A8. While floating-point performance isn’t important to all tasks and is certainly not as important as integer performance, it cannot be ignored if ARM wants its products to successfully migrate upwards into traditional x86-dominated market spaces."
@Sheldon
You clearly have not used a recent atom powered gadget then. I use my netbook all the time fully multi-tasking running Windows7 Home premium with aero turned on. I use Photoshop (obviously not massively due to the screen limitations) lightroom 3, Visual Studio 2008 along with amiga emulators, browsers and the usual office suites. So far they all run pretty much fine (although clearly the intensive tasks like building large visual studio projects, or some photoshop features run a little slower than they do on my laptop). The battery also lasts an age!
@Sheldon:
I think people have gotten it stuck in their minds that they need some suped up multi-core processor to do even the most miniscule task.
Have people truly forgotten about all the computing that was done quite efficiently before i3's, i5's and all this multi-core for multi-tasking madness.
It's very unlikely these devices are going to be running the latest versions of any common OS. They're probably going to be running dedicated software that is optimized for the hardware and runs qutie efficiently. When you do that you don't need the latest and greatest hardware. I would highly suspect the Atom will work just fine.
@Sheldon
Meh this isn't true at all, you guys all have no idea how light medical machines are for processors. I work for a medical company and we still use a 33MHz 486 in one of our machines, and our newest machine uses a Celeron M 500MHZ. The atom processors are blazing fast compared to what medical machines actually do, they just do some light calculations and commands basically. And no I'm not joking, we sell a $40K machine that uses a 486.
How can this possibly fail?
Oh wait GE Healthcare, billions of UK taxpayers money on implementing the NHS healthcare project that years later they still haven't managed to do.
@Bobbler
To be fair that is not soley GE healthcares fault. Having worked in the public sector I can tell you that there are probably 5 people duplicating pretty much every project item and arguing with each other in the process. Put that together with people in senior management posts that would struggle to tie their own shoe laces, project managers that would find it hard to plan their way to work and union bods complaining at everything that could be possibly associated with efficiency and it is a wonder that the UK public sector manages to do anything at all! On the court system project apparently they were paying £250 for a network socket (you know the ones you can get for less than £5 in the shops) and not one person ever questioned it!
I don't get it, why do you people pick on the atom? I'm sure it has "saved" the life of every atom-powered machine owner when they needed some quickly accessible computing.
It's not like a device that performs the task of an analogue measuring device needs more power than a Pentium 4, which was once the peak of desktop computing.
Let's face it, sometimes you demonize the Atom for no good reason and people who never used one might think it actually is crap. Yes! Some Engadget readers are not as tech-savvy as they believe themselves to be.
@trololo
If it were an Ipad End'Gadget would have been all over it with praise
@trololo "Sometimes" they demonize the Atom? xD
Of course, if this had a weak ARM cellphone processor in it, that would be a whole other story.
@Ducman69 I have a Atom in my 3 month old netbook and it's utter crap. Yes, a machine that monitors health doesn't need a powerful processor, but the Atom is no powerful processor. The Atom is crap because of the OS it *usually* runs. One could do more, faster, with the A4 on iOS than an Atom on Windows 7.
New meaning to "Blue Screen of Death"?
Cue argument about socialised health care in 5..4..3..2..1.....
@FinKM
Socialism FTW ;) but communism sucks, Capitalism FTW!!! =]
Would a quad-core processor really be enough to log the blood pressure reading from my arm?
Surely one of the new six-core desktop towers with tri-SLI.
After all, grandma needs to be able to multitask, like checking her blood pressure while pwning n00bs in Modern Warfare.
Old people are kind of sluggish too so, its a good fit.
Why all the atom hate engadget? It's much faster than an apple A4 yet you make it out to be slow as hell.
The only reason it appears sluggish is when it is running a full blown desktop OS and I would expect dedicated devices such as those in the article to use specific, customised operating environments such as a lightweight Linux kernel or a windows CE core, and not win7.
An atom processor is overpowered for a medical device, the people on here don't realize how light of a load these machines are processor-wise.
Come on, guys, this machine will run more than fine. The Atom may suck for Windows 7, but this machine isn't running Windows 7, that Atom will dominate at whatever this thing needs to do.
The camera that took this shot is amazing.... I like how it was able to selectively focus the screen on the computer, while the computer itself was out of focus.....
(someone in marketing needs to take a photoshop class)
I love the Life Alert ad reference. xD