By 2018, GE Healthcare, which provides medical technologies and services, plans to have invested $500 million in software. It already took steps by creating GE Digital in 2015. The goal is to be the world’s premier digital industrial company. GE wants to provide customers with the best industrials solutions and create software to solve real-world problems related to cost, access and quality.
Creating an ‘app store’

The newly hired 5,000 software engineers will focus on creating an ‘app store’ for Predix. Predix is GE’s cloud-based software platform on which one can find industrial apps from GE, partners, and developers. The software engineers won’t be working alone; GE is also looking to hire data analysts and imaging analysts. Together, they will be developing the ‘app store’ and platform, as well as creating hundreds more apps.

The new employees will join GE’s other 5,000 software engineers. They now constitute around 10% of all GE Healthcare employees.

Relocating to Chicago

To further its digitization, GE Healthcare will relocate hundreds of jobs from Barrington, Illinois, to Chicago. According to GE Healthcare CEO John Flannery, Chicago will offer the company a platform to work with healthcare institutions, start-ups, associations and industry leaders.

GE has already been creating software to improve some of healthcare’s biggest challenges — like access, quality and cost — in collaboration with several providers. The vast amounts of data the healthcare industry is receiving should help find solutions to these problems. The company will use imaging solutions, value-based care analytics, cloud technology and deep learning to cement their place in the digital healthcare world.

By merging minds and machines, GE Healthcare is striving to be a top 10 software company by 2020.