GE HealthCare announces strategic partnership with AWS to build AI models

GE HealthCare announced it formed a strategic partnership to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) healthcare and genAI services to build AI-enabled workflows that help improve the accuracy of diagnostic screening, streamline healthcare operations, and improve equitable care access and outcomes. 

GE will use Amazon Bedrock’s foundation models to create its own proprietary genAI applications and modernize its applications built on Amazon SageMaker.

The company’s developers will use Amazon Q, an AI-powered assistant, to generate code suggestions and assist in software development. 

It will also use Amazon Q to explore multimodal clinical and operational data, with the goal of improving efficiency, reducing physicians’ cognitive burden and allowing for personalized care. 

GE HealthCare plans to develop and deploy web-based medical imaging applications and integrate them across its equipment and software solutions to allow providers to analyze patient data better. 

The company says that using AWS’ generative AI tech will reduce the app development process from years to months. 

“Together, our teams aim to develop and deploy specialized foundation models and AI applications tailored for healthcare. By utilizing AWS’s cloud infrastructure and AI technologies, GE HealthCare is poised to accelerate innovation in really meaningful ways… reducing provider burden and operational inefficiencies, while improving diagnostic precision, therapeutic selection, patient outcomes, and healthcare access equity,” Matt Wood, vice president of artificial intelligence at AWS said on LinkedIn. 

THE LARGER TREND

AI, particularly deep learning algorithms, has shown remarkable progress in radiology, especially regarding image recognition tasks, according to a study published in the oncology journal Nature Reviews Cancer. 

GE HealthCare announced it acquired Intelligent Ultrasound Group PLC’s clinical AI software business earlier this month for approximately $51 million.

Intelligent Ultrasound offers integrated AI-driven image analysis tools, and GE planned to incorporate the company’s tools across its ultrasound portfolio. 

Yesterday, Microsoft announced a partnership with the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, its health system UW Health and Mass General Brigham to research and innovate advanced radiology-focused multimodal AI foundation models and develop medical imaging copilot applications.