General Electric, the world’s largest maker of medical-imaging equipment, and Intel will spend $250 million in the next five years to develop products for the $3 billion home health-care market.
The companies will collaborate on devices to help doctors treat stay-at-home patients without leaving the hospital, GE and Intel said last night in a statement.
Intel chief executive Otellini has spent four years seeking to sell devices and chips for home health-care monitoring, a market that research firm Datamonitor forecasts will more than double to $7.7 billion in three years in the US and Europe.
GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt is aiming to speed growth at the medical unit with products for the aging and chronically ill as demand for equipment like MRI machines declines.
“More of the care is going to take place in the home and be distributed in a fashion that in the next decade is going to be totally redefined,” Mr Immelt said in an interview.
“We get in on the early days of what home health care is really going to be all about.”
GE rose 57 cents, or 5.6 per cent, to $10.74 at 4.15pm in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have fallen 34 per cent this year. Intel gained 67 cents, or 4.5 per cent, to $15.70 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading.
The alliance will make health care more efficient by saving hospital visits for seniors and the chronically ill, Mr Otellini said in the statement.
The Obama administration earlier this year included measures in its economic-stimulus package to improve health-care information-technology systems and reduce costs.
The two chief executives said the market also will be fuelled by changes in how private and public insurers reimburse patients, with payments eventually tailored to specific conditions, they said.
Bloomberg