GE buys a wedge into small-office market

An acquisition gives the giant company a well-respected practice-management software product.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. Dec. 16, 2002.

GE Medical Systems Information Technologies has acquired Millbrook Corp., based in Carrollton, Texas, to gain entry to small physician offices that want an integrated electronic medical record and practice-management software product.

GE Medical Systems Information Technologies sells Logician, EMR software it bought earlier this year from MedicaLogic for $20 million. GE had trouble selling Logician to physicians because they wanted an EMR that could be integrated with an administrative system or vice versa, said Sunny Sanyal, vice president of clinical information systems of General Electric Corp.'s health care information technology business.

"As we launched ourselves into the ambulatory EMR space we realized that we could not offer a full end-to-end digital workflow solution unless we had a practice-management system offering as well," he said.

GE looked at several companies that have stand-alone, well-regarded practice-management systems as potential acquisition targets before buying Millbrook, Sanyal said. He declined to identify those companies or to disclose how much GE paid for privately held Millbrook, whose system is used by more than 9,500 doctors at more than 2,200 physician practices.

Several of those practices use Logician and have installed interfaces connecting it to Millbrook Practice Manager, meaning that interfaces linking the two GE-owned systems are available now. [...]