GE Healthcare and four major medical centers announced today that they will collaborate to develop an open architecture for connecting disparate health care systems worldwide.

The goal is a standards-based foundation that will readily support locally developed extensions and applications and will allow for sharing of information and best practices, said Dr. Brandon Savage, chief medical officer at GE Healthcare IT.

He said GE Healthcare and its partners are committing more than $200 million and 400 engineers to create and commercialize a common platform for health IT. The partner medical centers are Intermountain Healthcare, an integrated health care delivery system in Utah and southern Idaho; Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.; Montefiore Medical Center in New York City, and the University of California at San Francisco.

Savage said the new platform will align with the Nationwide Health Information Network, whose development the federal government is overseeing.

The GE platform will use many of the same standards that are part of the NHIN, including the standards from the Health IT Standards Panel sponsored by the Health and Human Services Department, he said.

"We wish that the standards would happen even faster," Savage said, because they enable the free flow of information and knowledge across systems. "The NHIN is a very good opportunity" to foster innovation and quality improvements in health care, he added.

Standards enable innovation because they allow new ideas to be replicated and shared, Savage said. A platform such as GE's will allow applications and systems to connect without the need to develop custom interfaces, he said.

In a related announcement, GE, Intermountain and Mayo Clinic Rochester said they will work together to deliver information about medical breakthroughs and best practices to health care providers, with the information targeted to clinicians' specialties.

"The use of digital technology is a key component to tackling the most difficult issue facing the health care system today: globally accessible, low-cost delivery of high-quality care," John Dineen, president and CEO of GE Healthcare, said in a statement.