Designing a hybrid or ensemble data mining system appropriate to the application is a research challenge. Heart disease is a life threatening disease that need to be recognized correctly in the starting stage before it becomes more complex. Using artificial intelligence techniques in a hybrid and ensemble architecture can support the prediction of heart disease more effectively based on the given sample cases. This paper proposes a classification system called genetic algorithm-based ensemble classification system (GA-ECS) for the identification of heart disease. As feature selection is the crucial step before applying the data mining techniques, the genetic algorithm is used in GA-ECS to identify the best features in a given dataset. The Cleveland heart disease dataset is used for testing GA-ECS. The performance of GA-ECS is compared with different machine learning classifiers for the prediction of heart disease. GA-ECS showed a promising outcome with an accuracy of 90% for the diagnosis of heart disease.