Seeking to take a larger slice of the $46 billion healthcare industry pie, Computer Sciences (CSC; Church Falls, Virginia), a nearly 50-year-old software development company, reported the launch of its Healthcare Sector.

Although CSC has held a presence in the healthcare industry for somewhat more than 20 years, the launch of the Healthcare Sector unit streamlines the company's previous efforts and allows for a greater expansion "into the realm of healthcare," Deward Watts, CEO of the new Healthcare Sector unit told Medical Device Daily.

Watts has been with CSC for 12 years and previously was VP and managing partner of CSC's Americas Healthcare practice. Watts will report to Michael Laphen, president/CEO and chairman of CSC.

The company "has been in healthcare for quite a while, but our involvement in healthcare has been one of those well-kept secrets... until eight o'clock [last Monday] morning when we made the announcement," Watts quipped. "The Healthcare Sector is going to be its own separate business unit and will focus on intellectual property developed at CSC into software and service offerings for healthcare providers, health plans and life sciences organizations."

The new sector offers clients onshore and offshore expertise with clinical information systems, claims processing systems and enterprise content management systems used by the healthcare. In addition, application management services and business process outsourcing offerings are supported from CSC's healthcare centers in Bangalore and Chennai, India.

"Organizing CSC's global healthcare resources into single vertical organization better positions CSC to help our clients use information to transform healthcare," Watts told MDD. "Our main focus will be delivering IT-based innovation that improves patient outcomes and the decision making of providers, payers and life sciences organizations.

"One of the new offerings we're developing is to have an Internet-based solution to give clients a measurement of how well they are performing against other hospitals in the area or hospitals in their own network," he said.

The Healthcare unit is bolstered by the company's $365 million acquisition of First Consulting Group (Long Beach, California), a healthcare information technology services organization. CSC purchased the company in October 2007 and closed on the deal in January, Watts said.

With the acquisition, the company received rights to the FirstDoc software suite. The software features a First Doc Clinical Trials Module that captures and manages Case Report Form documentation and Trial Master File information from clinical trials. It automatically compiles bookmarked, hyperlinked, PDF-formatted versions of patient casebooks that can be used for submissions.

In addition, it is using assets acquired in the $1.3 billion purchase of Convansys (Chennai, India) in April 2007 to expand the company's presence outside of the U.S.

Both 2007 purchases served as launch pads for the Healthcare segment, Watts said.

But there were other factors that led to the creation of this new business unit. "First of all, CSC is making a strong commitment to healthcare," he said. "The number of healthcare initiatives that we have around the world has gotten to the point that we had to have a more centralized approach toward managing those. You have the convergence of a market condition plus the commitment of CSC to use our assets to bring new solutions into the market place."

This marks the next chapter in the evolution of the company, formed in 1949 on nothing more than an idea and $100 between Roy Nutt, a computer programmer and Fletcher Jones, who excelled in marketing. The duo pooled their funds and expertise and by 1963 the company went public. Now it trades at some $43.54 a share and boasts a market capitalization of $7 billion.