GE Healthcare and Microsoft have announced senior executives and the name of their joint health IT venture, which was announced in December. The new company, called Caradigm, is expected to launch in the first half of this year.

The name is meant to embody paradigm shift in care delivery, said the firm's CEO-designate, Michael J. Simpson –  said he was pleased to find such an evocative moniker

"You see a name that reflects your company and your mission, and it just works out," he said. "We were very surprised it hadn't been taken before."

The two parent companies each contribute to Caradigm's technology portfolio, which will build upon products such as Microsoft's Amalga health intelligence platform and GE Healthcare's Qualibria, clinical knowledge applications.

[See also: GE, Microsoft launch new health IT company.]

By developing clinical apps on an open and interoperable technology platform, Caradigm seeks to outfit health systems with systemwide intelligence meant to improve population health management.

Simpson said that when it comes to "collecting data, applying intelligence to that data, and then providing insight to the clinician," Caradigm will be uniquely positioned.

"If you look at everyone in the continuum from the McKessons to the Epics to the TheraDocs to the Humedicas, everybody who crosses that entire world, some of them are very good at collecting data, some of them are very good at applying intelligence, but very few can do all three."

Building upon technologies like Amalga and Qualibria, he said, Caradigm will have the "ability to aggregate data across these multiple silos of healthcare information. So, whether you're here in America with different ambulatory and laboratories and radiology clinics, et cetera, Amalga can pull all that data from those disparate locations, put it in one central location, and then we can apply this intelligence and insight to the care team.  And we've got that same ability in the U.K., Germany, China and all the other jurisdictions, which will be live on day one."

Indeed, Caradigm plans to make its mark worldwide, said Simpson. "We can look at healthcare from a global economic crisis point of view, every country, every government is struggling with the increasing costs of healthcare. And trying to bend the cost curve and reduce the overall cost of delivery of care is going to be the primary agenda of today and the next decade moving forward."

Caradigm's leadership team is drawn from both companies:

• Chief Medical Officer and Senior Vice President, Product Strategy Brandon Savage, MD, is currently chief medical officer, GE Healthcare IT
• Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President, Engineering Neal Singh is currently general manager of Microsoft Dynamics AX Global Financial Management
• Chief Operating Officer Nigel Mason currently serves as the director of GE Healthcare's Commercial Centre of Excellence.
• Chief People Officer Tami Lamp is currently senior HR director, Microsoft
• Senior Vice President Global Sales Steve Shihadeh is currently general manager, North American Sales and Field Operations for Microsoft Health Solutions Group
• General Counsel and Vice President Warren Ratliff is currently chief counsel of GE Healthcare IT Knowledge & Connectivity Solutions
• Vice President of Operations and Chief of Staff Bei-Jing Guo is currently senior director, Product Management and Marketing, Microsoft Health Solutions Group

Caradigm’s board of directors, meanwhile, will be composed of John Dineen, president and CEO of GE Healthcare; Jan de Witte, president and CEO, GE Healthcare IT and Performance Solutions; Kirill Tatarinov, president of Microsoft Business Solutions Division; and Amy Hood, corporate vice president and CFO, Microsoft Business Division.

[See also: Microsoft adds Sentillion to its portfolio.]

The management team "comes from a breadth of different experiences," said Simpson, but "all of them understand how to bring two cultures together, all of them have worked in multinational and global environments simultaneously, and so all of them bring a unique skill set to the table."

Demonstrations are being scheduled in both the GE Healthcare (Booth 2635) and Microsoft (Booth 1629) booths at HIMSS12 in Las Vegas next week. But Simpson noted that, with regulatory clearance still pending, "we're limited with what we can do."

That said, Caradigm officials plan to "be doing a lot of talking," he said. "Our goal is to show you what we have today, and then over the course of the next year to start to show the world the applications that we can do from an insight point of view and the application of intelligence, and really drive toward delivery over the course of the next year."