REDMOND, WA – Sometime in the next couple months, pending regulatory clearance, Caradigm – the new health IT company launched this past December by Microsoft and GE Healthcare – will get down to business. By combining GE's clinical applications with Microsoft's intelligence platform, officials say the new firm intends to help bring about, on a global scale, “a paradigm shift in the delivery of care."
Just before Caradigm introduced itself to the world at HIMSS12 in Las Vegas last month, Healthcare IT News spoke with the company's newly minted CEO, Michael J. Simpson, about the genesis of the 50-50 joint venture, about its executive team and about its grand plans to transform population health.

How and why did this all come about?

It started off from a conversation I was having with one of our customers at the Mayo Clinic last February. The Mayo Clinic has been a faithful [Microsoft] Amalga customer for the last three or more years. And so they were using Amalga for data collection and data amalgamation services. They were also part of the consortium work that was going on with GE and Intermountain Healthcare on how you attach intelligence and insight to data – that was the [GE] Qualibria project.

And so this person at Mayo said, 'If you really look at what Amalga is doing, and you look at what you're doing, if you guys could figure out how to work together, you would actually reduce my total cost of ownership, you would bring a platform to market much faster – and you would be uniquely positioned to take collecting of data, applying intelligence to that data and then providing insight to the clinician.

He looked at it this way: If we can figure out how to take the strengths of Amalga, to be able to collect and aggregate data very rapidly, all of the work that we had done at the Mayo Clinic and at Intermountain Healthcare, with the attachment and the application of intelligence to that data, and then being able to apply that insight over to the care teams, it would be a winning combination. And so that was really how the conversation got started.

So, after HIMSS11, in Orlando, we had conversations with Peter Neupert [then corporate vice president of the Microsoft Health Solutions Group] and the team at Microsoft. We originally started down the road of a partnership, like I think any good set of conversations begin with. But as we started to have the conversations about where we could go together, a partnership just didn't seem like enough. Partnerships come and go. We wanted something that was going to be both scalable and durable. And so, as we looked at what we had to offer, we believed a joint venture between our two companies would be the right option for our customers. It was something that would be scalable, something that is durable, and it would ensure the success of what we're trying to do in the market.

What response have you heard from your other customers so far?

We have what I'd classify as guarded optimism. Everyone we have spoken to sees the vision, they can see the power of what Amalga can do as far as data aggregation and collection, they can see the power of the knowledge that we can do with Qualibria, the things that we can do from a workflow integration point of view with [Microsoft's] Vergence and Sentillion.

But when you bring two organizations together, there're always hiccups. So, I think everyone is looking at this with cautious optimism. They truly believe in the mission, they believe in what we're trying to bring to market, but they do know that there're a lot of complexities when you bring two organizations together. So, they're now waiting for us to execute. Everyone has become a Missouri resident right now: It's the "Show Me State." They believe in it, they want it to happen – and they want us to show them that execution over the course of the next year.

What's been on your to-do list for the past few months, and what's going to be on it for the coming year?

First off, we have not achieved regulatory clearance to date, and so there's a lot of things we can and cannot do until we achieve that. As we said back in December, we're expecting this company to be operational in the first half of 2012. We continue to work with all the regulators in the different jurisdictions and are getting very positive feedback and expect that to happen soon. But until that happens, we can't get into all of the customer and related activities.

So, what we've been highly focused on right now are our employees. If you look at the most valuable asset any company has, it's their people and it's their customers. So, we've been doing an incredible amount of work with the employee populations of both GE and Microsoft, to ensure they're being retained, that they're focused on the new venture, they see the vision and the mission of what we're trying to achieve. So we've been doing a lot of roundtables and ensuring that our employees are getting a good feel and understanding for what we're trying to achieve with Caradigm as we move forward.

From a customer point of view, we're limited with what we can do. Of course, we as GE have met with all of our customers, making sure that they're happy and pleased with the direction, and are keeping them informed. The Microsoft team has done that on their side as well. Once we have achieved regulatory clearance, then we'll be able to do a lot more of the joint type of activities.

A word or two about some of the executives you've got lined up for Caradigm?

That's probably one of the greatest achievements we've had so far. Brandon Savage, MD, has been the chief medical officer and head of product strategy within GE Healthcare for the past 10 years. He's a brilliant person, who has a strong IT background. He was a practicing physician. So, he brings a ton of knowledge relative to product strategy to that position.

Neal Singh [chief technology officer and senior vice president, engineering] has been with Microsoft for almost 16 years. For every member of this management team, we looked for characteristics about being global, about being able to manage remote locations, being able to manage global workforces and really understanding what it takes to drive healthcare, and the change we need. Everyone was selected around those criteria. So, while Neal does not have an incredible amount of healthcare experience, what he's done for the last 20 years is around enterprise resource planning. And if we think about what is an EHR, an EMR, it is an enterprise ERP for healthcare. So, he understands what it takes to drive those very large-scale projects, usually in four or five continents simultaneously, so he's a phenomenal hire from that point of view.

Tami Lamp [chief people officer] has been at Microsoft for many years and she's got great startup experience. She's done this several times in her career, and really knows how to orchestrate two cultures coming together. So, again, our number one concern is the people, making sure that they're coming into the new venture, so we've got somebody who understands that piece.

If you look at this management team, it comes from a breadth of different experiences. All of these people 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 to make this leadership team, bar none, one of the best ones I've had the privilege of working with.

I've noticed you are really emphasizing the 'global' nature of this new company.

That's correct. We 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 of the next decade moving forward.

And so this concept of episodic care that the world has gone down over the past 35 years has got to change. And what we're seeing changing globally, not just here within the United States, is the shift from episodic care over to population health or longitudinal care, depending on the words you want to use. So, from a payer's point of view here in the United States, how can they manage, cradle to grave, and really start to get ahead of these chronic diseases before they become chronic diseases – it's the same activity that's going on in the U.K., in Germany, in China, etc.

The beauty of Amalga, the beauty of Qualibria, is that we've got 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, 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.