On Wednesday, General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt announced that GE will invest $250 million to partner with health IT and diagnostics companies, the AP/San Francisco Chronicle reports (Seaman, AP/San Francisco Chronicle, 10/21).
The "Healthymagination Fund" will target three major areas:
- Health IT;
- Life sciences technologies; and
- Medical diagnostic tools (Merrill, Healthcare IT News, 10/21).
The funding dedicated to health IT will help support:
- Clinical information systems;
- Electronic health records;
- Health data exchanges; and
- Value-added data services (Goedert, Health Data Management, 10/21).
Part of a Larger Campaign
The $250 million announced this week is part of the broader $6 billion Healthymagination initiative that GE launched in May (Glader, Wall Street Journal, 10/22). GE's Healthymagination campaign aims to:
- Help health care providers adopt EHRs (Malone, Reuters, 10/21);
- Improve access to health care;
- Increase health care effectiveness; and
- Reduce health care costs (Tirrell/Layne, Bloomberg, 10/21).
