Los Angeles — Remote health care is poised to become big business in the coming decade as baby boomers continue to age. Intel Corp., and General Electric Co., have joined forces to develop a health care alliance back in April of 2009. On Monday the duo officially announced the launch of “Care Innovations,” a joint venture focused on assistive technologies for the elderly and those living with chronic conditions.
Last August, GE and Intel unveiled plans to team up on a 50-50 joint venture that will develop technologies that would cater to healthy, independent living at home and in senior housing communities, as well as for the growing telehealth market. Now the initiative, dubbed as GE Care Innovations, has received its final regulatory clearance. A new executive team was also named that will steer the new entity.
The Sacramento, California-based Care Innovations joint venture will utilize the expertise and resources from Intel’s Digital Health Group and GE Healthcare’s Home Health division that will concentrate on issues such as an aging population, higher incidence of people with chronic conditions, and expensive healthcare costs faced by the growing number of elderly people in the U.S.
Anne Maree Battersby (nurse) with patient Catherine Bradley using the Intel Health Guide. Picture: Jane Dempster Source: The Australian
“Our vision as we launch this exciting new company is for Care Innovations to positively affect millions of people by providing innovative products and services that will enable new models of care,” says Louis Burns, CEO of Care Innovations, in a news release.
(Credit: Screenshot by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore/CNET)
Intel president Paul Otellini said health systems were “already at saturation point,” yet planners were still focused on integrating technology into traditional healthcare settings.
“While those investments are necessary to create efficiencies, they are not sufficient to meet the coming impacts,” he said. “This partnership will take a giant step forward in changing how healthcare is delivered.”
The partnership will also concentrate on residential support technologies based on sensors that send alerts in case of a fall and other applications involving movement detection, and also focus on applications to help the elderly remain in their homes as well as independently in senior living facilities.
According to Intel, the alliance will embark on three main areas: chronic disease management, independent living, and assistive technologies. GE and Intel have, in fact, already commenced functioning on a number of telehealth innovations. Intel has developed the Health Guide (a personal telehealth system) and the Reader (a handheld reader that features large text), and GE is working on Quiet Care (a remote monitoring system for the elderly).
“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,” Otellini said in a statement.
And those products are just the beginning. Care Innovations will spend more than $US250 million developing new fall prevention, medication compliance and personal wellness systems over the next five years. Care Innovations estimates that the telehealth and remote patient monitoring business will balloon from $3 billion in 2009 to $7.7 billion in 2012. That means there is plenty of room for innovation.
Towards this initiative, the venture will have Louis Burns as Chief Executive Officer, Douglas Busch as Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Lauren Salata as Chief Financial Officer.
In addition to Burns, GE and Intel also named four members to Care Innovations’ board. Senior Vice President of GE and President and CEO of GE Healthcare Systems, Omar Ishrak, is chairman of the board for the company.
During the time of the Aug. 2 announcement, Jeff Immelt, GE’s chairman and CEO, described how telehealth technology for the aging population could help lower health care costs.
“Controlling health care costs while bringing quality care to an increasingly aging population is one of the largest global challenges we face today,” Immelt said in a statement. “We think this joint venture will offer great potential to address these challenges by improving the quality of life for millions while lowering health care costs through new technology.”
The company is depending on a flourishing trend to support seniors living independently in their own homes, and new remote patient monitoring systems that can reduce emergency presentations by people with chronic medical conditions.
Cisco is another IT trailblazer testing new ways of keeping patients out of acute medical facilities. This year, it brought architects, doctors and IT professionals together in Melbourne for a two-day workshop on rethinking hospital design for the digital era.
In addition to Intel and GE, other companies active in telehealth include American Well and Kaiser Permanente.