November 29, 2015 — The GE Health Cloud was unveiled at the 101st annual Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) meeting in Chicago. Designed exclusively for the healthcare industry, the new cloud ecosystem and its applications will connect radiologists and clinicians to speed efficiency and collaboration across care pathways and multidisciplinary teams – both inside and outside the hospital setting.
Today, survey data shows that up to 35 percent of patient cases are misdiagnosed, partly due to a lack of access to images, data and records. Industry consolidation and cost pressures are squeezing margins and pushing providers beyond hospitals' four walls. The interoperability of systems could save healthcare ecosystems $30 billion per year. The cloud-based apps quickly connect clinicians with imaging, data, analytics, insights – and other clinicians – to increase efficiency, effectiveness and collaboration.
The new cloud will connect to more than 500,000 GE imaging machines, shifting image post-processing from on-site machines to the cloud. From the cloud, 3-D images can then be viewed on multiple devices – inside and outside the hospital setting. The GE Health Cloud and apps will give clinicians on-demand, flexible computing power that can scale up or down.
By opening its cloud for third-party app development, GE intends to attract independent software vendors (ISVs) to develop their apps in the new cloud ecosystem.
Four new radiology apps were introduced at RSNA that will run in the cloud – all targeted at advanced imaging and clinical collaboration. They include:
- Centricity Cloud Advanced Visualization – This app will manage image post-processing and allow radiologists and clinicians to view advanced 3-D images anytime, anywhere;
- Centricity Multi-Disciplinary Team Virtual Meeting – This app will help multidisciplinary teams do collaborative care planning, ultimately helping radiologists and pathologists reduce the time they spend preparing for meetings by up to 20 percent;
- Centricity Case Exchange – This latest edition of Centricity Case Exchange will allow affiliated and non-affiliated systems to share images and reports and quickly confer on patient cases and treatment plans; and
- Centricity Image Access Portal - This app will provide affiliated and non-affiliated physicians with longitudinal patient imaging data, potentially improving turnaround times for patient reports.
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 Healthcare made several other innovation announcements at RSNA, including:
- ViosWorks2 – ViosWorks2 is a cardiac magnetic resonance (MR) solution that seeks to help solve several cardiac MR challenges at once. With this free-breathing scan, typically acquired in less than 10 minutes, ViosWorks can simultaneously provide key elements of a cardiac MR exam: anatomy, function and flow;
- Logiq E9 XDclear 2.0: This new Logiq E9 ultrasound system offers complete ultrasound – head to toe, obese to thin, neonate to geriatric – across a wide variety of cases, from the routine to the technically challenging. The system optimizes the imaging from the pulse of the probe to each of its pixels and every step in between, resulting in: 22 percent more contrast, 99 percent improved spatial resolution and 170 percent more image information, according to the company;
- DoseWatch Explore – This Web-based, Microsoft Azure cloud-deployed dose management software tracks, analyzes and reports practice-level dose data for GE computed tomography (CT) systems. It is now available for select CT systems in the United States. DoseWatch Explore software can be used to quantify the benefits of low-dose technology such as AsiR;
- MR Performance Excellence –This outcome-driven solution is based on machine data, analytics and advisory services and is now available in the United States. It drives measureable improvement of GE MR systems' throughput, efficiency, utilization, productivity and report turnaround time, according to GE, resulting in reduced gap time between exams, increased throughput and reduced exam time; and
- Interventional Assist Packages – GE Healthcare is showcasing its Assist brand, a collection of new interventional imaging software packages designed for specific clinical subspecialists and complex endovascular procedures to help clinicians perform procedures with greater accuracy, dose efficiency and confidence.
The GE Health Cloud will use key interoperability standards, including: FHIR, HL7 and DICOM; full attestations for HIPAA privacy compliance; security including HITECH and HITRUST; and SOC2 certification.
For more information: www.gehealthcare.com
April 16, 2024 
