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Even with a DVR and excellent fast-forwarding skills, it was difficult to miss the "healthymagination" commercials from GE Healthcare during the Winter Olympics in February. From a nifty new pocket ultrasound gadget to a promo for electronic health records, General Electric seemed determined to sell a high-tech health care vision to the American public, sandwiched in between luge and short-track speed skating.

Being the corporate sibling of NBC, which broadcast the Olympics, probably helped get GE Healthcare a good deal on air time, but that's hardly the whole story.

According to the New York Times, the $80 million healthymagination advertising campaign is the largest that General Electric has ever directed at consumers. In addition to television, it encompasses print and lots of new media, including dozens of YouTube videos.

What is a giant company like GE doing promoting a tiny slice of its business to people who aren't even direct customers for those products? And what does it mean for the future of that business?

Undoubtedly, the company is working the angle of getting consumers to connect the dots. "If I go to the doctor and I'm not comfortable with him looking at a computer while he's examining me, that's going to retard adoption," says Eric Brown, who follows health technology as research director at Forrester Research, Cambridge, Mass. "But if patients start to ask why their doctor doesn't have a computer, they become another demand agent speeding adoption."

But healthymagination is more than a marketing campaign, says Brandon Savage, M.D., chief medical officer for GE Healthcare Integrated I.T. Solutions. It's an attempt to address the issues surrounding health care in a systemic way, both in the United States and worldwide.

It's also an internal reorganization of the company's health care activities and a new way of parceling out resources. GE has allocated $2 billion to the whole initiative over the next six years. In order for a new product or service to get healthymagination funding, it has to have the potential to benefit one of the three legs of the classic health care stool: It has to decrease cost, improve quality, or increase access.

Savage says the initiative grew out of the company's health information technology business, because I.T. is an essential tool for coordinating quality and cost. "With the health care debate, these types of things that used to be in the background became relevant to every consumer in the country," he says. "That drove us to become a lot more public about the value of I.T."

Healthymagination was unveiled in May 2009, and the Vscan miniature ultrasound machine is one of its first major fruits. The second is Qualibria, an ambitious decision support tool that builds on work done at Intermountain Healthcare and the Mayo Clinic.

"Healthymagination" doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but it's a successor to an earlier GE consumer campaign, the slightly more mellifluous "ecomagination," that highlighted the company's various environmental businesses. Consumers didn't buy many of those products either, but at least they learned about them, and that was good for GE.

"We talked to consumers about clean coal and energy-efficient locomotives and planes," says Savage. "We got a lot of benefit from increasing awareness in society, and that's going to be true even more in health care. In general, consumers are not aware of what drives the quality of their experience with physicians and what makes a good health care system good."

One healthymagination commercial, called "Let's Take A Look," shows doctors through the ages examining a child's tummy. Of course, it isn't until the 21st century that the doc can see inside the tummy, with a slick new pocket ultrasound device called the Vscan.

The Olympics turned out to be a good venue for grabbing the attention of physicians, says Al Lojeski, general manager of cardiovascular imaging for GE Healthcare. "The response has been tremendous."

The campaign included a Web site where potential buyers could request more information. "We got hundreds of leads coming in that we would not normally receive from mailers, sales reps and trade shows," he says. "People have been buying it sight unseen."

Anthony DeMaria, M.D., a leading cardiologist at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, has gotten to try the Vscan out for the past several months, and wouldn't be without it now. He uses it to check for anatomic abnormalities, fluid around the heart, or leaky valves, and always wants it with him, whether on rounds, in the ER, or in the clinic.

"It can tell you, in a general sense, all the information that a full echocardiogram will," he says. "It's not a precision measurement, but it's a screen. It fits comfortably in my pocket. The only medical instrument I've carried around with me at all times has been my stethoscope, but now I can have this. If there's any question that it can answer, I use it."

DeMaria believes that such devices could revolutionize physical exams, not just by cardiologists but by primary care physicians. The Vscan can detect such phenomena as distension of the jugular vein, enlarged livers or spleens, or urinary obstructions.

Lojeski says results from Vscan exams should slide easily into the patient's electronic health record.

"When you open the device-like a flip phone-it creates a unique patient exam and ID," he says. Pressing the "store" button sends a JPEG or MPEG file onto a micro SD storage card. The user can move the file to an EHR through a card reader or a dock for the device itself. The files can also be e-mailed. Because many EHRs can't handle the DICOM format, an industry standard for PACS, GE elected to use the less specialized MPEG and JPEG formats, but Lojeski says there's conversion software available for users who need DICOM.