Get the right data to healthcare providers at the time they need it, and chances are overwhelming that patient care will be significantly improved.

To that end, and to help facilitate the necessary transition to a faster moving, more decentralized data access system, GE Healthcare recently announced a strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver AI and cloud-based imaging solutions, integrated data, and clinical and operational insights to hospitals and healthcare providers.

In particular, GE will be moving to the cloud both its Edison Health Services platform and its newest AI-powered imaging tool, the Edison True PACS picture archive and communication system.

“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, in a statement. “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.”

The Edison Health Services system is designed give hospital customers the ability to integrate and assimilate significant amounts of data from disparate sources using the cloud, thus increasing clinical efficiency and productivity and helping clinicians improve patient care.

GE Healthcare will also offer its Edison data aggregation and AI analytics platform on AWS to help developers build, test, and validate new AI models more easily, while facilitating the adoption of novel applications into clinical workflows. The company also plans to make additional products within its imaging portfolio available on AWS including AI-based advanced image processing applications that radiologists use.

As for Edison True PACS, while the company says upgrading PACS systems has traditionally been a slow and expensive undertaking for hospitals and imaging centers, leveraging a cloud-based PACS solution will reduce the need for complicated and lengthy PACS upgrades in the future and help to ensure that radiologists always have the latest tools to benefit their patients while ultimately lowering the total cost of ownership, and keeping pace with the growing workloads and complexity that occurs within the hospital. 

“By allowing GE Healthcare and AWS to handle the backups and duplication of the data, 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. “From our perspective, this presents an opportunity for significant savings by eliminating the costs associated with onsite hosting and data storage.”

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