Strategic Collaboration Announcement
GE HealthCare and Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, have announced a transformative partnership aimed at advancing healthcare through generative artificial intelligence (AI). This collaboration focuses on developing purpose-built foundation models and AI applications designed to enhance medical diagnostics and patient care.
Purpose and Goals
GE HealthCare has chosen AWS as its strategic cloud provider, planning to leverage AWS’s healthcare and generative AI services. The goal is to build innovative foundation models that will reshape the future of healthcare. These generative AI-powered workflows are expected to streamline healthcare operations, improve diagnostic accuracy, enhance patient outcomes, reduce access barriers, and promote equitable care.
Key Statements
Peter Arduini, President and CEO of GE HealthCare, emphasized the company’s long history of pioneering medical technology. He highlighted the strategic importance of this collaboration with AWS in pushing the boundaries of innovation to enable precision care.
Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, noted that the partnership aims to use cloud technology to deliver more personalized and efficient care. He highlighted AWS’s investments in healthcare-specific cloud services and generative AI capabilities as critical to this collaboration.
Technological Advancements
GE HealthCare plans to utilize Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service providing secure access to leading foundation models, to create and deploy custom AI applications for healthcare. This initiative will benefit from Bedrock’s enterprise-grade security and privacy, as well as its broad selection of industry-leading models.
In addition, GE HealthCare will use Amazon Q Developer for accelerating software development with real-time code suggestions and Amazon Q Business to analyze multi-modal clinical data, thereby reducing cognitive burden and increasing efficiency.
Future Developments
The partnership also includes plans to modernize GE HealthCare’s suite of applications using foundation models developed on Amazon SageMaker. These models will enhance medical imaging applications and integrate with AWS HealthLake and AWS HealthImaging to improve clinical efficiency and patient care.
Industry Impact
Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, Global Chief Science and Technology Officer at GE HealthCare, expressed optimism about the potential of generative AI to simplify and personalize medical care. He highlighted the collaboration’s role in advancing healthcare innovation.
Dr. Keith Dreyer, Chief Data Science Officer at Mass General Brigham, also praised the potential of generative AI to transform healthcare, emphasizing the importance of new tools and applications resulting from industry collaborations.
Data Utilization and Future Prospects
The healthcare sector generates approximately 30% of the world’s data, much of which remains untapped due to its unstructured nature. This collaboration will focus on developing multi-modal foundation models capable of analyzing diverse and unstructured medical data to provide precise and adaptable insights.
GE HealthCare’s investment in AI includes recent projects such as an advanced ultrasound image segmentation tool, demonstrating significant accuracy and generalization capabilities. This research tool highlights the potential of foundation models to be applied to a wide range of medical use cases.
