GE has announced a new VC fund for healthcare to the tune of $250 million. They’re calling it the GE Healthymagination Fund. I wonder how long it took them to come up with that name. Here’s some more details on what areas the VC fund will target:

The formation of the fund is part of GE’s $6 billion Healthymagination initiative, a global commitment to deliver better healthcare to more people at lower cost. The fund will target three broad areas for investment:

-Broad-based Diagnostics, including imaging, home health, patient monitoring, molecular diagnostics, pathology, novel imaging agents and other technologies for disease diagnosis.
-Healthcare Information Technology, including electronic medical records, clinical information systems, healthcare information exchanges and value-added data services.
-Life Sciences, including tools for research and development in biopharmaceuticals and stem cells, and technologies for manufacturing of biopharmaceuticals and vaccines.

The fund will draw on capabilities from across GE Healthcare, GE Capital and GE Global Research, and will have a global footprint.

No doubt GE has a ton of capital available to them. One thing that I find interesting is how GE will balance the funds goals of investing in high quality products and the challenge of funding something that might compete with an existing GE product. I think the EMR example is a simple and good one. Will GE fund an EMR that competes with Centricity EMR. This is nothing new for large corporations, but is definitely a challenge they’ll face.

One thing is certain. There are a lot of really great opportunities to invest in the healthcare space right now.

Thanks to Shahid for pointing this out.