GE Healthcare Collaborates with AWS to Speed Innovation and Transform Care Delivery

As a provider of diagnostic imaging solutions, GE Healthcare aims to deliver accessible services and applications to its customers in a responsive, agile way. To help its customers provide virtualized care to patients, the company needed collaborative cloud engagement and looked to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to support its cloud transformation journey. In 2020, GE Healthcare began accelerating its AWS engagement to expand the cloud availability of its solutions. By working alongside AWS and engaging AWS Partner Programs, the company can deliver new and innovative healthcare solutions and support its customers along their own cloud adoption journeys.

GE Healthcare is a global provider of digital diagnostic solutions, serving customers in more than 160 countries and offering solutions in areas that include imaging, ultrasound, life-care solutions, pharmaceutical diagnostics, enterprise IT, and advanced artificial intelligence. GE Healthcare’s radiology and enterprise IT solutions provide critical data management for diagnostic devices, supporting healthcare and hospital workflows. The company invests $1 billion in research and development annually and has four million imaging, mobile, diagnostic, and monitoring devices deployed globally. Additionally, its imaging devices perform more than two billion patient scans annually.

GE Healthcare first engaged AWS in 2014 to support its solutions. In 2019, the company saw interest from healthcare providers to increase and accelerate their cloud adoption—a need that later increased in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. “The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted remote working conditions, which led to many conversations about how to make radiology IT, and some of our other solutions, more accessible,” says Tim Rose, Executive, Digital Product Management, Radiology at GE Healthcare. “Using the cloud is an important part of that journey for our customers.”

Wanting to work alongside a cloud service provider that could deliver practical cloud insights to complement the company’s diagnostic imaging expertise, GE Healthcare chose to deepen its AWS engagement. In 2021, GE Healthcare entered a Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS to transform care delivery using AWS services. The company is working to build a holistic, trusted, multiyear cloud engagement focused on facilitating innovation and delivering customer value through next-generation, artificial intelligence–enhanced, cloud-based imaging solutions that are designed to be secure, cost effective, and simple to implement. Working alongside AWS and using AWS services, GE Healthcare can accelerate innovation, deliver differentiated customer value, and understand and position new product offerings.

To fulfill the growing need for cloud-based healthcare products, GE Healthcare is working to assess its cloud architecture and deliver securely designed, customer-friendly solutions. “Working alongside AWS, we can simplify our architecture so that when we migrate it to the cloud, it truly meets the goal of being accessible to all users,” says Rose. To develop these accessible cloud solutions, GE Healthcare relies on services that include Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), which makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which offers object storage built to retrieve virtually any amount of data. The GE Healthcare team aims to engage increasingly more cloud services to lower its customers’ cost of ownership. It also hopes to reduce friction and operational burden for customers’ IT teams—for example, when securely migrating petabytes of data from on-premises systems to the cloud. Collaborating with AWS, GE Healthcare has gained a level of scalability and flexibility not available with on-premises technology.

GE Healthcare also looked to improve agility and time to value for its customers by delivering software as a service (SaaS). And by investing in its AWS engagement, the company can differentiate its offerings for customers. “Business agility refers to the way we can fundamentally change how we bring solutions to our customers, facilitate easy onboarding, and support trials so that new applications can be quickly vetted and implemented,” says Rose. “In the healthcare industry, that’s a big thing.” To achieve its goals, GE Healthcare works with multiple AWS teams. This includes using prescriptive guidance from the AWS SaaS Factory Program, which provides access to technical and business content, best practices, solutions architects, and SaaS experts that can guide and help organizations accelerate delivery of SaaS solutions on AWS. This guidance includes architectural, business model, and organizational transformation consulting.

The transformation helps GE Healthcare to expand its solutions, including making services for radiology IT, artificial intelligence, and advanced postprocessing available to a distributed set of users. Delivering a SaaS-based offering is an industry innovation that requires GE Healthcare to work closely with customers to support their adoption journeys and facilitate success. In consultation with AWS SaaS experts and using the extensive service portfolio of AWS, GE Healthcare can deliver a better experience for its customers. “Some cloud workloads are simple to adopt, and others are closer to the clinicians and are more complex,” says Lynn Richard, Vice President of Global and Strategic Alliances at GE Healthcare. “We understand that, and we are working closely with our customers as they make their journeys to the cloud.”

As its customer engagements mature, GE Healthcare is optimistic that the simpler onboarding and lower maintenance requirements of its emerging SaaS-based solutions will support innovation. “Our advanced visualization suite has been individually managed at a user level, creating a barrier to that technology,” says Rose. “Now we will be able to make that experience frictionless and easily deliver those cloud-hosted solutions. Then we can have a deeper dialogue with the clinician about what’s working and what’s not.”

In 2021, GE Healthcare announced the commercial availability of Edison True PACS, a solution for radiology workflow efficiency, and Edison Datalogue, a solution for medical image storage and access, on AWS. In 2022, the company plans to launch several additional applications on AWS. “Our level of collaboration with AWS is accelerating and has grown across both development and go-to-market efforts,” says Richard. In December 2021, GE Healthcare joined the AWS ISV Accelerate Program, a cosell program for organizations that provide software solutions that run on or work alongside AWS. By receiving cosell support through this engagement, GE Healthcare will be able to further strengthen customer outcomes as it works to accelerate solution delivery.