March 2, 2016 — GE Healthcare announced two large systems integrators (SIs) and seven leading-edge independent software vendors (ISVs) are planning to move their digital solutions to the new GE Health Cloud. Designed exclusively for the healthcare industry and resting on the shoulders of GE’s Predix platform, the GE Health Cloud will ultimately connect more than 2 million imaging machines worldwide, including 500,000 GE Healthcare devices.
The company also unveiled its own new cloud-based analytics apps for the health information technology (IT) professionals, clinicians and executives at the 2016 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) meeting in Las Vegas.
The new SIs and ISVs to sign with the GE Health Cloud will bring IT solutions for clinicians across a range of care areas, including cardiology, radiology and surgery.
Capgemini and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), two leading system integrators, announced plans to build customized apps for their customers using the GE Health Cloud:
- As a systems integrator and solutions provider, Capgemini brings industry-leading expertise in the healthcare and life sciences domain. Having provided connected healthcare and visualization solutions across several clinical specialties, Capgemini will leverage its business and digital expertise for its work on Predix to provide consulting and end-to-end solutions on the GE Health Cloud.
- Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) will leverage its business, digital and healthcare IT expertise to develop new applications on the GE Health Cloud platform. An existing partner of GE Healthcare and GE Digital, TCS will offer end-to-end solutions to its GE Health Cloud customers. TCS will leverage its consulting experience to ensure quality control and regulatory compliance in these new applications.
One ISV, Barco Healthcare looks to work with the GE Health Cloud to develop ways to improve image sharing between physicians and radiologists to support patient-centric care. Barco’s goal is to use the cloud to help improve collaboration between remote physicians while minimizing image degradation.
GE Healthcare is also building on its existing partnership with Arterys Inc., a company specializing in deep learning applied to imaging beginning with the heart, providing accurate quantification of blood flow and clinical visualization.
GE Healthcare ViosWorks is powered by Arterys, which provides a real-time visualization platform that delivers quantitative data and structured reporting. ViosWorks is not yet commercially available.
Other new planned ISV participants in the GE Health Cloud include:
- Pie Medical Imaging provides cardiologists and radiologists with advanced visualization and quantitative analysis tools to help improve diagnosis. Pie Medical aims to leverage the scalability and rapid processing power of the GE Health Cloud to deliver insights to clinicians in a shorter timeframe.
- Candescent Health provides a software-enabled service that helps radiology organizations better manage their radiology workflow and reading assignments, to help them to work to improve clinical consistency, increase physician efficiencies and drive greater healthcare value. By integrating with the GE Health Cloud, Candescent Health aims to make it easier and more cost-efficient to bring its technology and services to its customers.
- caresyntax digital integration solutions from S-CAPE GmbH, addresses productivity and safety in operating rooms and other acute areas through IT, video and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. By moving to the GE Health Cloud, S-CAPE aims to facilitate improved education and knowledge management for clinicians, while minimizing IT infrastructure and support requirements and upfront IT investments for participating hospitals.
- Imbio will develop computed tomography (CT) biomarker analyses which may help physicians deliver new, personalized diagnoses for patients with chronic lung diseases.
- Radiology Protocols offers a suite of products focused on revolutionizing radiology department workflow. By integrating its workflow with the GE Health Cloud, Radiology Protocols aims to streamline the management and analysis of large amounts of radiologic data, which could improve collaboration and facilitate best practices among radiologists.
Apps on the GE Health Cloud will be delivered on a subscription basis, enabling hospitals and health systems to shift computing expense to a variable cost model. The cloud ecosystem will include a robust Software Development Toolkit (SDK), and its app store will host and promote new software solutions. To help ISVs run their cloud businesses more profitably, the cloud will also include a complete billing and subscription management infrastructure.
GE also announced six new analytics applications that are being developed internally to be hosted on the GE Health Cloud. These apps are targeted to help clinicians in departments across the healthcare enterprise, including hospitals, health systems and physician practices:
- Centricity Insights for Financial Management is an advanced set of analytics to help healthcare systems reduce claim denials and related re-work costs. The DenialsIQ analytic, announced at HIMSS 2015, uncovers hidden patterns within claims denials so that administrators can proactively fix them.
- Centricity Insights for Intensive Care will use a patient's data such as age, weight, smoker, diabetes and time on the ventilator to create a digital twin of the patient to help clinicians predict the average length of stay for that patient in the intensive care unit, and the probability that the patient will have further specific complications.
- Radiology Insights for X-ray Repeat/Reject Rates is intended to help reduce repeat/reject rates by using machine data to track and trend such rates and identify follow-up training needs.
- Radiology Insights for Modality Utilization will use machine data to track modality utilization across a region or hospital system to help care delivery networks optimize the use of their modality assets.
- CortexID Suite may provide insights to physicians in the image interpretation process of amyloid positron emission tomography (PET) studies conducted on patients being evaluated for cognitive impairment, or other causes of cognitive decline, and is an adjunct to other diagnostic evaluations.
- Centricity Insights for Materials Management Optimization will analyze healthcare provider inventory, suppliers and the cost of materials used in cardiology, perioperative and interventional radiology procedures to help drive action.
GE also announced a new portal that will provide a framework for payers and providers to collaborate. Centricity Solutions for Payer-Provider Collaboration aims to help payers gain better insight into the care that they are paying for, and help providers demonstrate their adherence to payer protocols while closing care gaps for high-risk and other patients. As a result, higher quality care may be delivered at a lower cost, which aligns with new and emerging reimbursement and delivery models.
For more information: www.gehealthcare.com