Hospitals and physician offices perform 3.6 billion imaging procedures annually worldwide, generating reams of data typically housed in hard drives often only accessible within a specific health system.
GE Healthcare, a Chicago-based manufacturer and distributor of medical technology and diagnostics equipment with major operations in the Milwaukee area, is partnering with Amazon Web Services to make this data easier to access. GE Healthcare plans to offer its AI-based imaging applications and imaging compilation platform on Amazon's cloud, allowing physicians to read the data using artificial intelligence.
“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, chief digital officer at GE Healthcare. “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.”
RELATED: Tech Awards — GE Healthcare eases discomfort by melding AI with MRI
Most hospitals use what is known as a Picture Archive and Communication System (PACS) to store and analyze imaging data, including x-rays, MRIs, PET scans and ultrasounds.
GE Healthcare, which has about 6,000 Milwaukee-area employees according to Milwaukee Business Journal research, has long sought to better store, access and use that data. The company has developed more than 200 digital and image-based applications that leverage AI to analyze the data that comes from the over 4 million devices the company manages and 2 billion scans the company produces annually.
Analyzing that data is no longer the only challenge. Accessing the data is increasingly difficult, as health care systems move away from one hospital site into a model with multiple locations. The pandemic spurred more decentralized care: care and diagnostic imaging is increasingly delivered out of patients' homes, while some physicians have had to try to access imaging while working remotely.
GE said moving the data platform to the cloud will make it more accessible, will make updates of the system easier and will also make it easier to share the platform with developers, who can use it to make new and better AI tools.
Health care systems say it also will work as a data backup tool, eliminating expensive data duplication that currently happens on site.
“We can reduce our backup workload on site while knowing our data is secure,” said Richard Duemmling, chief of business operations at Neuro Imaging in Winter Park, Florida, in a release. “From our perspective, this presents an opportunity for significant savings by eliminating the costs associated with on-site hosting and data storage.”
To start, GE will launch GE Healthcare’s Edison TruePACS, a medical imaging storing and annotation platform, on the cloud. The platform currently includes artificial intelligence tools to process radiology images, and additional products with further AI tools are likely.
Hospitals and imaging centers can choose to switch entirely to the cloud or work in a hybrid model.
The partnership is the latest radiology partnership GE has undertaken in recent years. Last year, GE Healthcare announced a partnership with Mass General Brigham (then Partners HealthCare), and the MGH & BWH Center for Clinical Data Science to create artificial intelligence software that mines both the imaging platform and a patient’s electronic medical record.
