Microsoft Corporation and General Electric are combining their efforts equally into a joint venture that will develop software for healthcare providers, making it easier to file, transfer and look up patient information, according to news reports.

San Diego joint venture attorneys note that the new business venture is being taken on by the two companies in a 50-50 split. The project is expected to employ 700 people at its start, and possibly more as the venture develops.

The new software aims to solve the complexities of retrieving patient information when patients may have visited with several different doctors. Incomplete patient histories are an unfortunate circumstance that doctors and other healthcare providers grapple with on a daily basis, but without the patient's cooperation in forwarding medical information from one doctor to the next, it can be difficult to track down or access a patient's full medical history.

Putting patient histories on a shared database accessed by a single software is expected to make it much easier for healthcare providers to access medical histories. Rather than having histories transferred, they will be automatically available through the software regardless of whether a patient is new to the clinic or healthcare facility.

This latest venture into the medical industry is not surprising for GE, which has been increasing its involvement in healthcare computer systems over the past few years. In 2009 it partnered with Intel to develop a system that allows doctors to monitor a patient's health remotely.

Source: Fox Business "GE, Microsoft in Health-Care Software Joint Venture" Dec. 8, 2011