Bree Bush, Vice President, Chief Data Officer at GE Healthcare, sat down with me for a deep-dive into simulation modeling and advanced analytical tools to optimize inpatient, procedural, and clinic capacity; the concept of “real-time healthcare”; digital transformation in healthcare and medical research, and much more.
Here is a sneak peek of our conversation:
Q: As you were aggregating all of this medical device data, what sort of brought you to this place of, “hey, we need to maybe start talking to pharma companies.” What bridged working with hospitals, institutions, and healthcare providers into the realm of working with pharma?
A: What we saw on the market was that pharma started a lot of these pill plus programs (beyond-the-pill) that are focused on how can they really impact the quality of care and the access to care. Their focus is on the drugs that are on the market but are no different. It seems like it’s still early days in terms of our conversations but we saw them heavily investing in developing AI solutions for clinical decision support and better diagnosing these rare diseases that are really hard. If you think about it, they’re really the only ones incentivized to do this because if I’m a provider, a hospital, I might see one of these patients a year. I’m not going to spend a lot of money on AI development for one patient a year.
Even GE healthcare, we focus on more broad use cases as well that are going to differentiate our products. They have this niche case for a rare disease or difficult-to-diagnosis disease creating these AI solutions. Where they see the bridge and where I think there is a great partnership, is how they have massive research companies that have been studying the disease for drug development and now developing AI but didn’t have a deployment platform. That’s really a unique area that GE has the capability to truly impact is bringing these to market in the workflow, which I think is very critical. There are enough IT solutions going at providers every day.
We had invested heavily in our Edison platform which, the whole job is to take and aggregate information, orchestrate AI, and push it directly back into the workflow; directly into the source systems or the packs or whatever they might be using. We’ve found this really nice synergy where, as they’re investing more, GE is a great platform, I think our size and scale, the number of products we have in our market really help us to get these out there as quickly as possible, and as effectively as possible. That’s one area that we have decided to start with. Again, we’ve been building this business over the last year and a half but that seems to be a really good alignment. I think over time we’ll do more AI development together. As I mentioned, we are both very focused on precision health. How do we find more patients that are like those ones that they saw in the trials, exactly like that, how do we automate that? I think there will be more in the future but that’s our initial focus.
For more of our discussion, you can watch the whole Fireside Chat with Bree Bush, or listen to the podcast version, below.
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