GE Health Cloud Welcomes New Partners, New Apps to Ecosystem Connecting 2 Million Imaging Systems Worldwide

LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--GE Healthcare today announced two large systems integrators (SIs) and seven leading-edge independent software vendors (ISVs) are planning to move their innovative digital solutions to the new GE Health Cloud. Designed exclusively for the healthcare industry and resting on the shoulders of GE’s industrial-strength 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 IT professionals, clinicians and executives at the 2016 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) meeting in Las Vegas.

“The GE Health Cloud will host powerful analytical tools and services that turn mountains of data into actionable insights, which help drive better outcomes for healthcare providers,” said John Flannery, President and CEO, GE Healthcare. “This is the future of healthcare: software developers, hospitals, academic institutions and manufacturers joining together to improve patient care and enable an industry-wide transformation to value-based care – and we are honored to showcase real progress here at HIMSS.”

COLLABORATIVE INFRASTRUCTURE DRIVES OUTCOMES

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, today announced plans to build customized apps for their customers using the GE Health Cloud.

• Capgemini has a long-standing relationship with GE Healthcare. 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.

“The industry needs disruptive technology and solutions as it navigates rising clinical, operational and financial pressure,” said Jan De Witte, President and CEO of GE Healthcare IT. “We believe the GE Health Cloud will be that disruption. It’s a collaborative, healthcare-specific ecosystem that will bring the greatest minds around solving healthcare’s greatest challenges.”

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.

“The main challenges we are trying to solve are bringing clinicians and specialists together to share images, information and expertise in an intuitive, accessible and workflow-optimized way,” said Lynda Domogalla, Vice President of Marketing at Barco Healthcare. “A strong cloud ecosystem should be open and accessible to any clinician, anywhere and should be compatible with all the tools they use in their daily workflow. With the longtime relationship that Barco has with GE Healthcare, there is positive synergy for us to build solutions for the GE Health Cloud.”

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.

“Leveraging the GE Health Cloud, we look forward to developing next generation solutions that utilize our proprietary quantification and visualization algorithms together with deep learning to advance diagnostic imaging capabilities in neurology, oncology and many other areas of healthcare,” said Fabien Beckers, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Arterys.

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 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 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.

ANALYTICS APPS SPAN THE ENTERPRISE

GE Healthcare 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 was announced at HIMSS 2015, and is currently being ported to the GE Health Cloud. DenialsIQ uncovers hidden patterns within claims denials so that administrators can proactively fix them. This helped one customer reduce denied charges by 47%, saving $93k in re-work cost in one month.1
• 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 ICU (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 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.

BEYOND THE GE HEALTH CLOUD AT HIMSS

Aligned with the industry shift to value-based payment and the increasing convergence of payer-provider relationships, GE Healthcare announced a new portal that will provide a framework for payers and providers to collaborate.

The new portal, called 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.

With the accelerating shift to value-based healthcare, both payers and providers are seeking insights on revenue and costs so that they can engage fully with CMS payment, data and quality initiatives.

The GE Health Cloud will use key interoperability standards, including FHIR, HL7 and DICOM, be compliant with applicable HIPAA privacy and security requirements and seek HITRUST and SOC2 certifications.

GE Health Cloud is not for patient use. Not for sale. Anticipated availability 2H 2016.

For more HIMSS news and announcements, visit The Pulse @HIMSS.