GE Healthcare alliances in the medical devices and diagnostic market
GE Healthcare, a $17 billion unit of General Electric Company, has an active alliance programme in a range of technologies covering medical imaging, healthcare IT, diagnostic imaging agents, patient monitoring, drug discovery and protein separation.
Much of GE Healthcare's development and alliance strategy is focused on creating an 'early' healthcare model, shifting away from 'see and treat' technologies towards diagnostic tools that detect diseases at an earlier stage in their development than heretofore possible opening new opportunities for early management of disease. Two separate research collaborations GE Healthcare entered in 2006, with the biopharmaceutical companies Pieris Proteolab AG and Isogenica, are focused on the discovery and development of novel targeted in vivo diagnostic and medical imaging compounds that could help earlier detection and diagnosis of major diseases such as cancer.
GE Healthcare is also active in alliances which can improve the delivery of treatment. In October 2005 the company entered a collaboration with the intravascular ultrasound company Volcano Corporation to develop a state-of-the-art digital cardiovascular imaging system. The aim of the partnership was to integrate GE's all-digital x-ray system cath lab system with Volcano's new PC-based IVUS platform to provide interventional cardiologists with a clear view of coronary and peripheral vessel morphology so as to assist in them in the performance of therapeutic procedures such as stent placement. In June 2007, GE Healthcare also announced an agreement with the drug delivery company I-Flow Corporation, to conduct a clinical trial to measure the effectiveness of GE's ultrasound products for making nerves easier to find when deploying I-Flow's anaesthsiology infusion pumps to bloc pain.
In the competitive diagnostic market, one of the ways GE Healthcare could gain an advantage is through the integration of its technology with information technology. GE Healthcare began a five-year research collaboration in June 2007 with the computer-aided detection software company Medipattern to develop computer-aided detection for existing GE Healthcare ultrasound platforms and future ultrasound imaging solutions. In August 2007 GE Healthcare also signed an alliance with EuroKing Miracle, a UK supplier of maternity information systems. The aim of the collaboration is to find a way to combine EuroKing's software presently being used in a range of equipment found in maternity departments, such as maternity information systems and CTG monitoring to gynaecological and pre-natal diagnosis and data archiving, with GE Healthcare's maternal and infant equipment such as fetal monitoring and ultrasound imaging systems.
GE Healthcare is also entering alliances to boost its position in clinical, financial and administrative information technology solutions. In February 2007 GE Healthcare jointly announced with the software company Lexi-Comp Inc a web-based system that combined drug information with electronic medical records. Three months later GE Healthcare began collaborating with the cancer care software company IntrinsiQ LLC to aid a cancer patient?s team of clinicians by developing a system that provides oncology clinical information within a patient?s electronic medical record. In August 2007 GE Healthcare entered an alliance with the telecommunications company Sprint, to develop in-building wireless communications services for hospitals in North America. The aim is to provide hospitals with a comprehensive platform for voice and data communications over secure cellular, Wi-Fi and telemetry infrastructure that requires only one installation.
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