General Electric (GE) announced yesterday that it will spend $3 billion over the next six years on new medical technology as part of its new "Healthymagination" initiative. The initiative will also include participation with healthcare providers that have been actively involved in healthcare innovation in the United States, including Salt Lake City-based Intermoutain Healthcare, the Mayo Clinic, and the Cleveland Clinic.
The goal is to launch at least 100 innovations that "lower cost, increase access, and improve quality by 15%," said GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt, at a conference held in Washington. This means the company will be "accelerating health information technology, improving access, and really driving health into the home and into more preventative settings."
At the same time, the company will focus on the health of its 600,000 workforce as well. "In employee settings, we are going to make our workforce healthier," Immelt said.
The company will invest in wellness and healthy worksite programs and is aiming to keep the annual rate of growth of employee health costs at the consumer price index or less.
One focus of the initiative will be electronic medical records and other information technology. GE, working with Intermountain Healthcare and the Mayo Clinic, already has developed physician decision support through IT in the form of evidence based care and announced that it will be launched commercially in 2010.
Brent James, MD, executive director of Intermountain's Institute for Healthcare Delivery Research, said at the conference, that they mostly use the EMR to build it into workflow--"so it becomes the routine way things are happening."
The Healthymagination initiative is being patterned after GE's successful "Ecomagination" program launched four years ago that emphasized environmental issues.
“We saw the same type of tipping point,” Immelt said. “We learned that technical innovation can drive solutions and value for customers, investors, employees, and the public."
President Obama's budget carves out $879 billion for health and human services spending, a 7.7% increase that includes more money for items such as cancer research and food-safety inspectors. The budget includes about $600 billion over a decade that would help pay for the president's healthcare overhaul. That's expected to account for roughly half of the total cost of the expansion. Congress is now sketching out the details on exactly how the overhaul will be financed and what measures it will include.
As a way to pay for the plan to expand health coverage to the nearly 50 million people who are now uninsured, the government is considering taxing people who already have the most expensive health benefits, as provided by their employers. By one Congressional estimate, it could yield $100 billion in revenue over five years. And although President Obama criticized the notion last year when Senator John McCain promoted it during their presidential campaigns, the concept now has some support in Obama's administration as part of an overhaul of the healthcare system.
General Electric is shifting the strategy in its $17 billion-a-year health equipment and technology business, seeking to broaden its reach with more lower-cost products. As part of the new health strategy, GE said it would invest $3 billion to develop at least 100 product and services innovations by 2015. The criteria for the new products will be that they lower cost, increase access, and improve quality by 15%. GE's health business, known for its medical imaging and diagnostic machines, is struggling in a weak economy as the hospitals and clinics that buy such sophisticated and costly equipment are reducing capital spending in the downturn.
The Framingham (MA) Planning Board voted to approve an outpatient screening and surgical facility proposed by Newton-Wellesley Hospital, reigniting opposition from supporters of community hospitals in Framingham and Natick. Opponents of the proposal by Newton-Wellesley, a nonprofit institution, say it poses unfair competition to MetroWest's facilities, potentially drawing away so many patients that the for-profit operation could close.
The FBI and Virginia State Police are searching for hackers who demanded that the state pay them a $10 million ransom for the return of millions of personal pharmaceutical records they say they stole from the state's prescription drug database. The hackers claim to have accessed 8 million patient records and 35 million prescriptions collected by the Prescription Monitoring Program. Read more about this topic in HealthLeaders Media's Daily News & Analysis.
The reputation of the University of Missouri-Columbia's medical school and its recruitment efforts could suffer after it landed on a short list of programs with serious shortcomings. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education placed the doctors' residency program at the school on a two-year probation based on an on-site review and interviews from 2008. Probations of entire institutions by the council are rare. MU is one of just five teaching hospitals out of 386 nationwide currently under the disciplinary action.
The Missouri House rejected a spending bill that would have added nearly 35,000 parents to the state's Medicaid system. But after that defeat, a committee of House and Senate lawmakers worked out a deal to keep the funds financing the expansion in the budget for a new, as-yet-unwritten plan.
Senate Republicans are seeking and getting detailed advice on the best way to attack the Obama administration's healthcare legislation. The suggestions are contained in a 28-page presentation by Frank Luntz, who has long experience in advising Republicans on tailoring their speeches and phrase-making to achieve maximum political benefit.
The World Health Organization says up to 2 billion people could be infected by swine flu, if the current outbreak turns into a pandemic.
WHO flu chief Keiji Fukuda told the Associated Press the number wasn't a prediction, but that past experience with flu pandemics indicated one-third of the world's population gets infected. Fukuda says that with a world population of 6 billion people, it's "reasonable" to expect that kind of infection tally.
