In a groundbreaking move, GE HealthCare has partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop innovative generative artificial intelligence (AI) models and tools designed to revolutionize the analysis of complex medical data. This collaboration aims to tackle one of the healthcare industry's most pressing challenges: making vast amounts of medical data more accessible and usable.
The healthcare sector generates nearly a third of the world's data, yet much of this information remains untapped. Patient records, medical images, scans, and insurance data are stored in diverse formats across different systems, making it difficult for healthcare professionals to efficiently sift through this data. A Deloitte report highlights that a staggering 97% of hospital-generated data goes unused. GE HealthCare, a leader in medical imaging, ultrasound, patient care, and pharmaceutical diagnostics, sees generative AI as a solution to this problem.
Partnering with AWS, GE HealthCare aims to create AI models that will help clinicians leverage data more effectively in areas such as screenings, diagnoses, decision support, and workflow management, including scheduling. "The tools we expect to build will help hospitals and clinicians make the most of the data they have," said Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, GE HealthCare's global chief science and technology officer, in an interview with CNBC.
AWS's advanced cloud infrastructure is expected to accelerate the development and deployment of GE HealthCare's web-based medical imaging applications, providing radiologists and other healthcare professionals with enhanced access to data analytics. GE HealthCare's existing AI tools will benefit from AWS's powerful solutions like Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, enabling the rapid creation and scaling of generative AI models.
"Training these models requires a lot of compute power, data, and expertise, and we're collaborating closely with GE HealthCare to meet these needs," said Matt Wood, vice president of AI at AWS. This partnership also aims to boost GE HealthCare's internal productivity. One priority is using Amazon Q Developer, an assistive tool that generates real-time code suggestions, to enhance the efficiency of GE HealthCare's software developers.
GE HealthCare is committed to rigorous testing and maintaining high standards before launching any products, including its new generative AI applications. Importantly, the company does not train AI models on customer data, ensuring privacy and data security.
Initially, these new AI models and applications will be available to GE HealthCare employees and select customers, with plans for wider accessibility in the future. This collaboration between GE HealthCare and AWS marks a significant step toward harnessing the power of AI to transform healthcare data analysis, ultimately enhancing patient care and operational efficiency across the industry.