The COVID-19 pandemic sent the healthcare industry scrambling to speed up its slow-moving shift to a more virtualized, tech-based care delivery model—and a new partnership between GE Healthcare and Amazon Web Services is hoping to make that fast-tracked transition much smoother.
GE Healthcare will begin moving several of its software platforms to the AWS cloud, making it easier for healthcare providers and artificial intelligence developers alike to access clinical data to improve patient care.
First to make the jump to the cloud are GE’s Edison Health Services platform and its newest AI-powered imaging tool, the Edison True PACS picture archive and communication system, which was specifically designed to be hosted on the cloud in order to reduce data storage costs and speed up the process of integrating AI into under-resourced clinics.
The Edison Health Services system is used by both clinicians and tech developers. It compiles data from a variety of sources—including electronic health records and imaging and other medical devices, spanning about 50 petabytes of data produced by GE’s hospital customers each year—then applies AI algorithms and digital applications to that information to generate wide-ranging reports of the condition of individual patients and the clinic as a whole.
Healthcare providers use the platform both to guide treatment for each patient and to identify and improve areas of weakness in their clinical workflows. AI developers, meanwhile, can access the clinical data to inform their own efforts to build and test out new algorithms to help those providers better analyze all of their collected data.
Bringing the Edison Health Services platform to the AWS cloud will make it even easier for those users to access the platform’s data management and analytical tools, compared to traditional on-premises software that can only be accessed in the physical locations where it has been installed.
Meanwhile, launching Edison True PACS and, eventually, GE’s other diagnostic imaging systems on the cloud will not only improve clinicians’ access to advanced imaging tools but will also make it easier for them to continually upgrade those systems as updates are released—typically a slow and expensive process for hospitals and imaging facilities.
“As the world moves towards a more virtualized and distributed care delivery model with home care, remote patient management and increased use of AI, radiologists and other clinicians need easy access to data that is seamlessly integrated, aggregated and visualized in applications and services across modalities and within their existing workflows,” said Amit Phadnis, GE Healthcare’s chief digital officer. “By doing this at scale, we are helping to drive clinical outcomes and achieving our goals of transforming healthcare to be more efficient and personalized.”
AWS has been on a roll this year in terms of its expansion into healthcare. In late July, it followed in the footsteps of rivals Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure to launch its own industry-specific cloud hosting platform, dubbed AWS for Health.
At the time of its official launch, AWS for Health had already racked up thousands of partners and customers, including GE Healthcare and Moderna, which is already using the platform to support its drug development efforts, including the production of its COVID-19 vaccine.
Fresh off that global launch, AWS has since re-upped its longstanding partnership with Baxter, with a focus on expanding the medical device maker’s portfolio of digital tools, making its business processes more efficient and applying AI analytics to its internal and external operations.