This is a crucial time for the history of mankind, as the world is unequivocally getting ravaged by a single virus strain. This is also a time when healthcare technology appears to be a pivotal aspect of conversations centered on navigating out of this crisis. Digital transformation in healthcare has been steadily on the rise in the past five years, and will continue its upward trajectory in the years to come. As industries adopt a digital-first approach, healthcare systems will witness maturity from data management to effective analysis of healthcare data, to predict and recommend better quality of caregiving models, enhance efficacy in clinical trials and precise management of the health of populations.

While medical professionals are the obvious billboards of the healthcare industry, this perception is rapidly changing to accommodate more ecosystem players such as scientists, drug controllers, pharmaceutical & medtech device manufacturers and their distributor network, healthcare policy experts, government healthcare representatives… What really ties them all together is data.

Did You Know? Hospitals produce 50 Petabytes of Data Every Year!

The healthcare industry sits on a mountain of data – a significant portion arising from patient records alone. While patient data has been digitized through Electronic Health Records (EHR) and Electronic Medical Records (EMR) systems, the bigger question is being able to make sense of all this data for more specific insights into disease patterns and genetic codes, and consequently better patient management. This can be achieved with the use of technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Advanced Analytics. The Deloitte Global Health Outlook 2020 cites that these top five technologies – Cloud Computing, 5G, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, and Internet of Medical Things can greatly streamline delivery of healthcare and align it with changing customer preference. Those enterprises already on this trajectory have nowhere to go but up. GE Healthcare is one of them.

Edison – The Visionary Technology-First Healthcare Platform

GE Healthcare launched Edison in 2018 with the aim of utilizing deep data from the GE Healthcare ecosystem along with health-centric data from the larger ecosystem for enhanced clinical, operational and financial outcomes. A combination of smart devices and applications assimilate and integrate data, derives actionable insights and delivers them to devices and workflows for maximum impact. This end-to-end application utilizing crucial healthcare data is a sound model for the industry to adopt and integrate.

Key Infrastructure Applications

Edison applications can be deployed via cloud, Edison HealthLink or a smart device. Some of the key infrastructure applications for medical professionals include: 

• Critical Care Suite – Automatic analysis of images, especially of those of collapsed lungs, for immediate triaging action by medical professionals. This was developed along with UC San Francisco, and was recently granted approval for use by the US FDA.
• Air Recon DL – A deep learning application to improve signal to noise and image sharpness
• Breast Assistant – AI based quantitative risk assessment, with results delivered in two seconds
• Embo Assist – a 3D Visualisation Software to help clinicians simulate embolization procedures for better practice
• SonoCNS – An AI tool to assess fetal brains

Other tools include Imaging Protocol Manager, AIRx, CT Smart Subscription, Edison Datalogue Insights, Mural, TrueFidelity CT Images, Imaging Insights, AFI 2.0 and Auto EF 2.0

Expanding The Scope for AI Developers

In a research report, GE Healthcare admits that while AI holds tremendous promise, its adoption is still slow – that its not at par with the projected need and urgency. This isn’t to say the potential is to be questioned. On the contrary, laggard adoption could be due to multitudes of information existing in silos and no alternatives to synergise these data banks. This is compounded with regulatory obstacles, data privacy concerns and lack of processes to present clean data –without pristine data, AI cannot live up to its complete range of efficacy.

One of the efforts made by the behemoth to integrate innovation efforts in healthcare is a common platform. In November 2019, GE Healthcare announced its Edison Developer Program – intended to accelerate adoption of technologies like AI across healthcare. This program brings market-ready AI applications to Edison and integrates them into existing offerings of GE Healthcare – on medical devices, on the network edge or the cloud. This platform will also help AI developers build scalable, data-driven models that can improve clinical outcomes. 

The opportunities for healthcare with a truly intelligent connected digital enterprise are significant, but no one organization can get there alone,” said Amit Phadnis, Chief Digital Officer, GE Healthcare. “The Edison Developer Program is unique in its deep technology integration and scaling through the workflow, opening the door to faster adoption by health systems. Bringing together leading technology providers, developers and academic institutions under a single, connected ecosystem will help our customers simplify and optimize data aggregation and orchestration of clinical and operational applications in ways that have the potential to create real impact from the bottom line to better patient outcomes.”

The company is working in tandem with a range of ecosystem partners such as Intel – for open source distribution of OpenVINO toolkit in the Edison platform for inference acceleration across modalities from edge to cloud; Saint Joseph Hospital Foundation in Paris for developing a full-fledged research lab to understand the usage and impact of AI and data analytics in operating rooms and other aspects of hospital functionality; PartnersHealthcare to integrate deep learning for improving patient journey in hospitals like Massachusetts General Hospital & Brigham & Women’s Hospital Center for Data Science in Boston for areas like cardiology, oncology, hospital operations and emergency medicine.

Leveraging The Hidden Potential In AI & Healthcare In India

Startups in India have burgeoned in the past decade. And we are the third largest startup ecosystem in the world with investments to the tune of $4.4bn as of last year. In addition, we’re the second most populous nation in the world with a healthcare market poised to touch $133.44bn by 2022. Combining these two forces of the industry is nothing short of an opportunity of a lifetime. More than 9,000 startups are technology-centric with a focus on addressing specific challenges. In addition, India does have polarizing healthcare systems in urban and rural pockets. One of the biggest challenges the country faces is in bringing telemedicine to rural areas to ensure quality of care by medical experts, who generally reside in big cities and metros. These are encouraging times for innovators, especially with a sound understanding of technologies like AI and funds to boot. GE Healthcare launched EdisonX in August 2019 – a startup collaboration platform-centred on the Edison platform. The company said that they would collaborate with startups, especially working in the fields of AI, IoT and advanced analytics, to enhance solutions aimed at enhancing clinical efficiency, patient distress and limit operational inefficiencies.

Nalinikanth Gollagunta, Managing Director, Wipro GE Healthcare, South Asia said, “The core intent of this program is to nurture the startup ecosystem and work with them to create healthcare solutions leveraging the Edison platform and decades of GE Healthcare’s expertise - solutions that will enable preventive healthcare, precision diagnosis and treatment in a timely and affordable manner, improved workflows keeping patient at the core and the clinicians, technicians, radiologists and IT support as the surrounding ecosystem. We are excited to make this platform available to India’s flourishing startup ecosystem.”

By November, GE Healthcare shortlisted six startups to work on the 1st cohort of Edison X – Synapsica, DeepTek, 5C Network, Cancer Moonshot, ORBO AI and Predible Health. The solutions include the use AI to help radiologists analyse scans faster and accurately, work with oncologists to develop precision software to track the pathways of cancer in patients; video quality assistance for medical professionals, and precision diagnostics for pulmonologists.

GE Healthcare continues to break new barriers in healthcare, and going by world events, they are on the right track. If there’s any chance at beating and obliterating viruses like COVID19, technology adoption is the best chance we have.

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