Partners HealthCare, GE Healthcare enter a 10-year AI partnership

artificial intelligence

Partners HealthCare and GE Healthcare are about to enter a 10-year collaboration to “rapidly develop, validate and strategically integrate deep learning technology across the entire continuum of care.” The collaboration will be executed through the newly formed Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital Center for Clinical Data Science, and will feature co-located, multidisciplinary teams with broad access to data, computational infrastructure and clinical expertise. The initial focus will be on the development of applications aimed to improve clinician productivity and patient outcomes in diagnostic imaging. Over time, the groups will create new business models for applying AI to healthcare and develop products for additional medical specialties like molecular pathology, genomics and population health.

“By combining the expertise at Mass General and Brigham and Women’s with the spirit of innovation at GE, this partnership has the resources and vision to accelerate the development and adoption of deep learning technology,” David Torchiana, MD, CEO of Partners HealthCare, said in a statement. “Together, we can empower clinicians with the tools needed to store, analyze and leverage the flood of information to more effectively deliver care to patients.”

The vision for the collaboration is to implement AI into every aspect of a patient journey – from admittance through discharge.

Once the deep learning applications are developed and deployed, clinicians and patients will benefit from a variety of tools that span disease areas, diagnostic modalities and treatment strategies. These tools are said to have the potential to do everything from decrease unnecessary biopsies to streamline clinical workflows to increase the amount of time clinicians spend with patients versus performing administrative tasks. Additionally, the teams will co-develop an open platform on which Partners HealthCare, GE Healthcare and third party developers can rapidly prototype, validate and share the applications with hospitals and clinics around the world.

“This is about creating digital tools that will have a profound impact on medicine,” John Flannery, CEO of GE Healthcare, said in a statement. “By leveraging AI across every patient interaction, workflow challenge and administrative need, this collaboration will drive improvements in quality, cost and access.”

The applications are being developed based on three criteria: 1) patient impact, 2) technical capability and 3) market appetite. The goal is to bring the most promising solutions to market faster, so they can start making an impact for hospitals, health systems and patients globally sooner.

The collaboration aligns with GE’s ambition to become a top 10 software business by 2020.