General Electric Co. trimmed the number of its operating units from 11 down to six, the company announced late last week. Officials with the conglomerate said the move could save GE up to $300 million.

GE Healthcare, headquartered in Great Britain, survived virtually intact as a standalone division. The other five operating units are GE Infrastructure, GE Industrial, GE Commercial Financial Services, NBC Universal and GE Consumer Finance.

The move was not seen as a response to any financial problems. GE still expects to hit its earnings per share targets of 43 cents 45 cents for the second quarter and $1.78 to $1.83 for 2005. Instead, analysts said the reorganization was a way for CEO Jeff Immelt to exert greater control over the company's future direction.

In other healthcare IT business news:

• Shareholders approved Symantec's acquisition of Veritas in a deal calculated to be worth $11 billion. Symantec, a leader in the personal computer security field, announced the stock deal for storage software vendor Veritas last December. It is expected to close on July 2.

• Despite Sun's acquisition of StorageTek earlier this month, the company has announced a deal with StorageTek rival EMC to ensure compatibility between the EMC family of networked storage platforms and the Solaris 10 operating system. EMC also intends to port key storage management software to Solaris 10 including EMC PowerPath and EMC Legato NetWorker, as well as software from its EMC Documentum, EMC Legato and EMC Smarts product families.

• Cerner officials confirmed the company would resell Positive Networks Inc.'s remote access software. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The partnership, initiated by Positive Networks, will give it access to Cerner's more than 1,500 healthcare customers. Positive Networks sells Internet-delivered software to corporate clients, which use it to access their desktops remotely from other computers.

• Omnicell Inc. and Witt Biomedical Corp. announced an inventory management partnership to enhance cardiology customers' workflow. Omnicell, a leader in supply management technology, and Witt Biomedical Corp., a cardiology image and information management systems (CIIMS) provider, disclosed the deal on June 24 and said it would provide cardiology departments and cardiac cath labs with integrated state-of-the-art productivity and data management systems.

"In the field of cardiology in general and the cath lab specifically, tracking inventory and supplies for each patient for billing and purchasing purposes is critical," said Omnicell chairman, president and CEO Randall A. Lipps in a prepared announcement. "By integrating our technologies, only one ADT interface – the interface that manages patients' admissions data – is required in the cath lab to take full advantage of our OptiFlex CL systems and Witt's CALYSTO for Cardiology technology. This results in operational and cost efficiencies for our customers."

• Cardinal Health has signed the Lahey Clinic to a five-year, $200 million supply agreement using Logisticsource. Under the agreement, Cardinal Health will establish a system to automate and improve the ordering, management and replenishment of pharmaceuticals and medical and surgical supplies at Lahey Clinic. Through Cardinal Health's LogisticSource program, supplies will be reordered automatically upon their use and delivered directly to the point of care.

• Vital Images and Eclipsys have established a marketing and sales partnership to provide advanced visualization and analysis software to radiologists. Under this agreement, the Eclipsys sales force will resell Vital Images' Vitrea 2 software to its customers as an add-on component to the Eclipsys Sunrise PACS solution. Sunrise PACS is part of Eclipsys' Diagnostic Imaging Solutions, which consists of Sunrise PACS and Sunrise RIS. Financial details were not disclosed.

Eclipsys officials said the addition of Vitrea software to the Sunrise PACS solution would provide radiologists with advanced visualization and analysis capabilities. 3D images are sent directly to the Sunrise PACS workstation, allowing radiologists to launch the application and post-process those images with a right click of the mouse, without interruption to the workflow.

• Venture capitalists continue to be interested in healthcare IT. Elemental Security, Inc., a company pioneering new technology in enterprise information security, announced it closed its Series C round of financing, raising approximately $11 million. Lehman Brothers Venture Partners led the investment round, with original investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Mayfield and Sequoia Capital increasing their investment participation as well. Meanwhile, Cymetrix (formerly Health Management Solutions), announced a private equity investment from Riordan, Lewis & Haden, although the company did not disclose the size of the investment.