With the coronavirus pandemic, providers have turned increasingly to cloud technology to enhance the transmission and analysis of health data, but analyzing data from a distance can threaten both operational efficiency and patient care.
Targeting the goal of enabling clinicians to collect, analyze and act upon critical data closer to its source, therefore, GE Healthcare recently introduced Edison HealthLink, new edge computing technology designed specifically for the needs of healthcare providers.
“COVID-19 has accelerated industry-wide trends with implications for the future of care delivery. It’s time to apply these trends and use them to modernize the current health system infrastructure,” said Amit Phadnis, Chief Digital Officer, GE Healthcare, in a statement. “As more care delivery becomes virtual and as more healthcare data moves to the cloud, technologies like Edison HealthLink provide a bridge, allowing devices to operate on premise, at the edge and in the cloud.”
When transmitting and analyzing data from a distance, concerns remain around bandwidth, network and latency challenges when a matter of seconds could determine the outcome for a patient. As an example, time is critical when diagnosing and treating stroke—around 2 million brain cells die every minute until blood flow is restored, increasing the risk of permanent damage. Running advanced post-processing software at the edge to evaluate brain scans allows clinicians to analyze and act upon critical data without sending it to the cloud, enabling rapid decision making.
By operating medical devices that connect to GE’s Edison HealthLink, health systems can continually receive advanced software updates without requiring new equipment – essentially extending the life of existing assets. With 10 applications already available through Edison HealthLink, the company says the new solution gives healthcare providers another entry point into the Edison ecosystem.
Separately, GE Healthcare also received U.S. FDA clearance for its Ultra Edition package on Vivid1 cardiovascular ultrasound systems, which includes new features based on artificial intelligence (AI) that enable clinicians to acquire faster, more repeatable exams consistently.
According to the company, methodical assessments of heart function are key in echocardiography but can be tedious and time-consuming to acquire. High quality data acquisition and operator skill are key elements to achieve accurate and complete exams. And, as patients undergo subsequent monitoring exams, the reproducibility of exam assessments is key to identifying improvement or disease progression. Vivid Ultra Edition brings increased efficiencies to the scanning process for reduced exam time through up to 80% fewer clicks, 99% accuracy and less inter-operator variability.
“With the Vivid Ultra Edition, we offer AI capabilities that help address healthcare providers’ two key challenges in echo exams – how time consuming the exam is and the degree of variability that exists in the quantitative results,” said Dagfinn Saetre, General Manager of Cardiovascular Ultrasound at GE Healthcare.