GE Healthcare, a division of General Electric Company has signed a strategic agreement with German e-health specialist InterComponentWare (ICW).

GE Healthcare will use ICW’s integration technology to develop the connectivity and integration capabilities of its Centricity products.

"Connectivity is one of the biggest challenges in healthcare today and it directly impacts the quality and cost of patient care," said Vishal Wanchoo, president and chief executive of GE Healthcare IT.

"Our strategic relationship with ICW enables GE Healthcare to accelerate our Centricity connectivity solutions and further extend our global capabilities.”

GE says that its Centricity health information exchange services allow clinical data from hospitals, physician offices, pharmacies, labs and other sources to be connected and securely shared.

ICW, which operates in the US and European markets, has ten years of intensive research and development of solutions for electronic health information interoperability.

In Europe, the firm’s e-health infrastructure is in use with the Austrian National Health System, the German Federal Ministry for Health and Social Security’s bIT4health consortium, the eHC in Bulgaria and others.

"Standards are essential to enable scaling of solutions to meet the demands of a global marketplace and to integrate third-party solutions to ensure the information exchanged is complete and timely," said Peter Reuschel, CEO of ICW.

"We are pleased to work with GE Healthcare on a vision to jointly evolve the connectivity solutions that we have each developed."

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