In April 2009, GE Healthcare and Intel formed an alliance to tackle the increasing global burden of chronic disease management and age-related conditions. Building on that work, today they announced that they’re starting a new healthcare company — which will be a 50/50 joint venture — with the focus being on telehealth and independent living. The idea is to use technology to bring more effective healthcare into millions of homes and to improve the lives of seniors and people with chronic conditions. (A live webcast of the announcement can be seen here at 2 p.m. EDT.) That theme is the subject of GE’s latest data visualization, “Our Aging World,” which is an interactive tool, seen below, that looks at the rapidly aging populations of eight industrialized nations. As the data visualization team notes, according to the United Nations, the elderly population of the world is growing at its fastest rate ever. By 2050, there will be more than 2 billion people aged 60 or over — a trend that will have an enormous impact on economies and healthcare around the world. In April 2009, GE Healthcare and Intel formed an alliance to tackle the increasing global burden of chronic disease management and age-related conditions. Building on that work, today they announced that they’re starting a new healthcare company — which will be a 50/50 joint venture — with the focus being on telehealth and independent living. The idea is to use technology to bring more effective healthcare into millions of homes and to improve the lives of seniors and people with chronic conditions. (A live webcast of the announcement can be seen here at 2 p.m. EDT.) That theme is the subject of GE’s latest data visualization, “Our Aging World,” which is an interactive tool, seen below, that looks at the rapidly aging populations of eight industrialized nations. As the data visualization team notes, according to the United Nations, the elderly population of the world is growing at its fastest rate ever. By 2050, there will be more than 2 billion people aged 60 or over — a trend that will have an enormous impact on economies and healthcare around the world.
 Seems like old times: Click the image to visit the interactive data visualization. Once on the site, scroll over the vertical bars to see the breakdown by age group and use the slider at the bottom to change the year. |
For example, when using the data visualization for Japan, although the population is expected to fall by 25 million people between 2010 and 2050, the percentage of those who are over 60 years old will be much larger. The data visualization above is the latest partnership between GE and Ben Fry, founder of Fathom Information Design. As with all of our other recent data visualization efforts, GE’s ongoing goal is to take what can often be intimidating amounts of scientific data and turn it into usable information that can drive action and make an impact in people’s lives.
Given the global aging trends — and the corresponding rise in people living with chronic conditions — the new joint venture between GE and Intel is focusing on the need to create new models of healthcare delivery that can extend care to homes and other residential settings. The JV comes amid strong evidence that telehealth and home health monitoring have the potential to improve quality of care while reducing costs at the same time. For example, in one Veterans Affairs study, patients with home healthcare provided by nurse telemanagement had over 25 percent fewer hospital readmissions over the course of a year, and the cumulative cost for readmissions of these patients was more than $136,000 less than those patients who had nursing home visits without telehealth.
Among the current technologies that will be placed into the new company — which is expected to be operational by the end of the year — will be remote patient monitoring, independent living concepts and assistive technologies, such as the Intel Health Guide, Intel Reader and GE Healthcare’s QuietCare. The new company will also develop new technologies for the telehealth and home health monitoring sector, which is predicted to rapidly grow from a $3 billion business in 2009 in Europe and North America to an estimated $7.7 billion in 2012
Said Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini: “We must rethink models of care that go beyond hospital and clinic visits, to home and community-based care models that allow for prevention, early detection, behavior change and social support. The creation of this new company is aimed at accelerating just that.”
*Read today’s announcement
* Read a fact sheet about the new venture
* See all of our healthymagination data visualizations in one place
Read more about GE’s work with Intel and data visualizations in these GE Reports stories:
* “Mayo Clinic launches Intel/GE Home Health tech study”
* “GE and Intel team-up on home health tech”
* “Remote healthcare tech: There’s no place like home”
* “Home health monitoring growth eyed in QuietCare buy”
* “Healthymagination studies Japan’s aging population”
* “Helping fix hospitals so they can better fix patients”
*”Google, Microsoft & GE in HHS data visualization pilot”
* “Visualizing health with The Economist Intelligence Unit”
* “Ben Fry at SXSW 2010: Visualizing data challenges”
