The ambitious joint venture planned by Microsoft and General Electric would combine the software giant's strengths in developing large-scale data platforms with GE Healthcare's expertise in building health-care applications.

On Wednesday, the two corporate giants announced the formation of the new company, to be based near Microsoft's Redmond campus.

The idea is to create systems that would allow health-care organizations to better track individual patients, as well as to take advantage of the ability to bring together, and make sense of, large amounts of data. The hope is also to deliver better care at lower costs.

The as-yet unnamed company, which will employ about 750 workers, still needs approval from antitrust regulators in several countries. Microsoft officials said they expect approval in early 2012, with a launch of the joint venture in early spring 2012.

The new venture will be headed by Michael Simpson, now vice president and general manager at GE Healthcare IT.

Microsoft corporate Vice President Peter Neupert, who organized the company's health-care technology efforts and worked in developing the new venture, will retire after six years running the Health Services Group and 18 years at the company. He will remain a full-time Microsoft employee through January 2012 and will subsequently work as a consultant to assist with the transition.

It's unclear whether Microsoft's Health Solutions Group will continue to exist but many of the employees and products currently with the group will be moving into the joint venture, said Nate McLemore, general manager of the Health Solutions Group.

HealthVault, Microsoft's Internet-based personal-health-records service, will remain at Microsoft, as will the team working on the service.

The Microsoft products that will become part of the new joint venture are:

... Amalga, a platform that allows health-care organizations to pull data from the hundreds of different systems a typical hospital uses and amalgamate them into a common database. Amalga is designed to make it easier for caregivers to get information about a single patient across multiple systems and to look at information across a group of patients so they can think about how best to provide care to that group.

... Vergence, which allows caregivers to log in to different systems in the context of a single patient. For instance, a radiologist who wants to see what drugs her patient takes may need to log off one system and log on to another to find that out. Vergence is designed to allow caregivers to go from one system to another without logging in and out.

... expreSSO, a smaller version of Vergence, which allows caregivers to move a single log on between applications but not necessarily between the same patient.

The GE products that will become part of the new joint venture are:

... eHealth, a health-information exchange that connects multiple systems across a community. A patient with diabetes, for instance, might have a primary-care doctor who's part of one practice group and an endocrinologist who's part of another. EHealth could connect those two systems, allowing the doctors to create a shared care plan across a team of providers.

... Qualibria, which allows caregivers to obtain and share best practices and build them into an organization's workflow. Qualibria is being developed in conjunction with the Mayo Clinic and Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare.

"Both Microsoft and GE Healthcare have a shared vision of what health IT needs," said Microsoft's McLemore.

Health-care technologies are now designed around improving workflow, so data become an afterthought, he said. Yet the amount and importance of data are growing exponentially.

The joint venture is designed to put all the data in one location and, just as importantly, "painting the picture of what the data represents," said Dr. Brandon Savage, chief medical officer with GE Healthcare IT.

The data and algorithms could help caregivers get a picture of what kinds of patients in a given group might be most at risk and how best to apply "the right care to the right patient at the right time," McLemore said.

Janet I. Tu: 206-464-2272 or jtu@seattletimes.com. On Twitter @janettu.