Medicare HMO Private Pay		Health Insurance Home Page Shopping Cart	Separate Search Page or search below
Navigation Help			Write To Karl Loren	Table Of Contents

WSJ:  November 2004:  Medical Administration Moves Further Into The Digital Age 

Source

	November 22, 2004

GE Wins Key Health-Care Contract IT Systems Gain Showcase In Deal With England Valued Over $200 Million By KATHRYN KRANHOLD Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL November 22, 2004; Page B5 General Electric Co. won a key contract to provide digital-imaging systems to more than 70 English hospitals and clinics as part of the country's unprecedented $18 billion project to wire its health-care system. GE's award, valued at more than $200 million over eight years, is notable in that it allows the company to showcase its information-technology systems at a time when the health-care industry world-wide is seeking to move into the modern age of digital technology. In the U.S., a number of politicians, including President Bush, have been calling on health-care providers to deploy information technology to reduce medical errors and improve efficiency. But U.S. health-care providers have been slow to adopt new systems largely because it is expensive and the return on the investment hasn't been evident. Adoption of information technology, however, is inevitable. The various systems look to eliminate hand-written medical orders and prescriptions that contribute to errors and call on physicians and health practitioners to enter their orders into a computer directly. England's National Health Service, which announced its project nearly a year ago, has already awarded billions of dollars in contracts to begin establishing a digital system in which its 50 million people will have an electronic medical record that could be accessed anywhere within the nation. England and its contractors hope the system will be a model for other countries. (For now, the plan applies only to England; the health systems in Scotland and Wales are run separately.) Numerous technology companies have been aggressively bidding for a piece of England's project, including Perot Systems Corp., Cerner Corp., and International Business Machines Corp. Accenture Ltd. has already been awarded two major contracts valued at nearly $4 billion. A consortium led by Japan's Fujitsu Services, which is overseeing the network in southern England, selected GE, based in Fairfield, Conn., as its provider of the picture-archiving and communications system known as PACS. The consortium also includes IDX Systems Corp., PricewaterhouseCoopers, Tata Consultancy Services and BT Group PLC. The group is providing technology that will serve 20 million people, in Britain's largest health-care region. "We see this as a great way of getting in on the ground," said Sir William Castell, a GE vice chairman and GE Healthcare's chief executive. "The rest of the world is watching what is happening in the United Kingdom to learn from it and digitalize as well." In the past couple of years, GE has acquired dozens of information-technology companies as it aggressively entered the health-care information-technology market. Its information-technology business is expected to contribute about $2.5 billion in sales to GE Healthcare's $14 billion in revenue for 2004. Write to Kathryn Kranhold at kathryn.kranhold@wsj.com1 URL for this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB110107331471080224,00.html   Hyperlinks in this Article: (1) mailto:kathryn.kranhold@wsj.com

Copyright 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.

SUBSCRIBE:  The Wednesday Letter is a free electronic monthly newsletter written and published by Karl Loren.  You can view more than 50 back issues of this publication by clicking here.  The Wednesday Letter subscription list is maintained on a secure server, no name is ever given or sold to anyone, and it is never used except for this Newsletter.  It is automatically published on the Tuesday night just before the first Wednesday of every month.  You can subscribe to this free monthly electronic letter by entering your eMail address and name below.  You will then automatically receive a request for confirmation, sent to whatever address you have entered.  If you do NOT receive this confirmation request, then you will not be subscribed.  There may have been an error with your address and you should resubmit.  The letter is never sent twice to the same address -- so you do not have to worry about a duplicate subscription.  When you receive this confirmation request you must reply to it, or your subscription will not become active.  No one can subscribe your name, and address, without you being notified, and if you get an unwanted notice of subscription you only need to DO NOTHING and the subscription will NOT be active.

REMOVAL:  You can remove yourself from the subscription list in several different ways.  Click here to read about this entire newsletter system.  Every edition of The Wednesday Letter is delivered to your address with YOUR name and address in view on the letter, with a link that allows you to remove THAT name from the subscription list.  If you try to send this removal message from an address different from the one you used to send in your original confirmation, then you will get a warning notice first, sent to the subscription address, asking you to confirm that you want to be removed from the list -- by replying to THAT request for confirmation, you will then be automatically removed.  Thus, no one else can unsubscribe you, from some other computer, without your knowledge.  But, if you send in the unsubscribe notice from the same machine used to receive the Letter, then the removal from the subscription list is automatic.

Personal Message:  When you send a personal message to Karl Loren, you will receive a personal reply as per his instructions.  Karl pledges that every personal message will get a personal answer. When you provide your mail address, we will send you free information including our free catalog and a cassette tape lecture by Karl Loren about heart disease, no charge, by mail, even if outside the US.  You can select particular information you would like to receive, along with the free cassette tape and catalog.