At HLTH 2024, GE HealthCare announced a new CareIntellect offering: a cloud-first, digital solution designed to help care providers tackle both clinical and operational challenges.
At HLTH 2024, GE HealthCare announced a new CareIntellect offering: a cloud-first, digital solution designed to help care providers tackle both clinical and operational challenges.
CareIntellect for Oncology, the first application within CareIntellect, brings together multi-modal patient data from disparate systems into a single view. The application uses generative AI to summarize clinical notes and reports, surfacing relevant data to help care teams quickly understand disease progression and flag potential deviations from the treatment plan. This allows clinicians to determine potential next steps and consider proactive interventions. In addition, CareIntellect for Oncology assists in assessing clinical trial eligibility and tracking adherence to treatment protocols in an easy-to-navigate view.
Through upcoming releases, CareIntellect will also help healthcare systems address operational challenges.
Today, healthcare providers face inefficiencies such as delayed patient intake, transitions, and resource shortages, leading to denied or delayed care, poor bed utilization, and higher costs. For example, according to a 2024 NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report, 70% of patients are boarded in the emergency department or post-anesthesia care unit due to a lack of staffing or bed capacity, driving up costs and impacting patient care. Once available, CareIntellect applications for operational use cases will help healthcare providers monitor real-time and historical operational metrics, identify bottlenecks, and assess system performance using indicators such as admission rates and patient flow.
Abu Mirza, the General Manager and Global SVP of Digital Products at GE HealthCare, believes that when historians look back, they will recognize COVID-19 as the event that accelerated the adoption of new AI-powered solutions like CareIntellect, which prioritize operational efficiencies, allowing clinicians to focus on patient care.
AI is critical for hospitals because it can identify patterns in large datasets, helping them match patients with the right bed quickly and giving healthcare staff network-wide visibility. Here’s where cloud computing plays a vital role: the massive demands for compute, storage, and networking required by AI can only be efficiently managed at scale through the cloud. According to OpenAI, the amount of compute used to train large AI models has doubled every 3.4 months since 2012, far outpacing Moore’s Law.
“If we want to harness the power of AI to solve the problems facing our industry, we have to adopt cloud computing now,” says Mirza.
Mirza believes that besides the technological demands of AI, COVID-19 also heightened economic pressures on healthcare systems, forcing CIOs to focus on accelerating the adoption of cloud computing. A 2022 Gartner report noted that increased expenses from COVID-19, rising inflation, and the need for technology investments placed significant economic pressure on hospitals and health systems in the years following the pandemic.
Cloud computing is more cost-effective than on-premise deployments of IT infrastructure – a 2020 Accenture study found that migrating to public cloud can potentially result in up to 30-40% total cost of ownership reduction.
“Because cloud computing becomes cheaper as you scale, it allows CIOs to get a handle on marginal costs that can otherwise prove debilitating for healthcare systems,” adds Mirza.
A 2024 CIO Insights report made available by Gartner emphasizes the shift Mirza refers to. According to the report, 76% of healthcare providers have already adopted or are planning to adopt distributed cloud environments within the next three years.
COVID-19 was also a turning point for Mirza personally. Witnessing the pandemic's societal impact inspired him to transition from a technology-focused career to one centered more deeply on healthcare. He co-founded Neeramoy, a telehealth solution designed to help patients in rural areas find and view doctor profiles and book appointments.
In this conversation, Mirza discussed how AI can help accelerate the delivery of quality care, how CareIntellect supports this mission, and how AI can transform healthcare by enabling doctors to make more meaningful connections with their patients.
Q. Why do you think of COVID-19 as a trigger point for the adoption of AI in healthcare?
In the days following the pandemic, people worldwide saw something we in the healthcare industry have always known: the incredible burden weighing down our clinicians and the entire healthcare system.
Our clinicians are overwhelmed with a massive cognitive load from sifting through and analyzing a deluge of data—from transcripts, audio files, video, imaging, and more. Electronic medical records, imaging management solutions (PACS), and specialized applications offer varying capabilities to organize, manage, and derive insights from this vast volume of medical data. A patient's care journey involves multiple specialists, numerous scans, and vast amounts of clinical data, each representing discrete insights that contribute to a much larger, complex puzzle. Making sense of all this data is a massive source of cognitive overload for our healthcare providers.
Moreover, patient care doesn't operate in isolation from the burdens this deluge of data places on the overall system. Both providers and patients must navigate many stages, with each representing a potential bottleneck that can impede quality care. Think about a nurse scheduling a CT appointment within two hours, only to find that none is available for two days.
Now imagine her having to do this for every patient, every day.
Many current solutions are inadequate to address these challenges. For example, while EMRs offer a centralized repository of patient data, they often lack interoperability, limiting a comprehensive view of the patient’s journey. Customizing and extracting actionable insights from these systems is cumbersome, leaving care teams with data but no clear direction for action.
This is exactly what AI is made for—making sense of large amounts of data to simplify day-to-day life. We’ve seen AI work its magic in areas like e-commerce and music, and we should absolutely leverage its power to drive improvements in healthcare. I believe that’s what COVID-19 has done. It has shown us that the status quo is unsustainable, making us more open to exploring the possibilities opened up by AI and cloud computing.
Q. How does CareIntellect help address some of the problems you talked about?
We are designing CareIntellect to help elevate the quality of care while also increasing operational efficiency.
As they become available, applications within the CareIntellect offering can be integrated to address various disease states. We are designing our solution to help enable more precise diagnoses and more personalized treatment, leading to improved patient care.
For instance, treating prostate cancer involves input from specialists in imaging, medical oncology, radiation oncology, and surgical oncology. By consolidating a complete view of a patient’s medical history, we can help doctors make better informed clinical decisions, moving beyond basic diagnosis to more personalized screening, diagnosis, and treatment.
We’re also developing CareIntellect applications for operational use cases that incorporate predictive and real-time insights into staffing, health equity, and quality of care. Once they are available, CareIntellect applications designed to boost operational efficiencies will also be able to schedule necessary follow-ups for treatment plans and submit them for approvals.
By offering clinicians a comprehensive suite of applications and capabilities, CareIntellect is designed to make life easier for our care providers while enhancing the quality of care.
Q. How do you see AI ultimately transforming the field of healthcare?
When I talk to friends and family, or when I reflect on what inspired me to pursue a career in healthcare, I’m struck by how many people want to devote their lives to healing patients.
Yet so often, doctors, clinicians, and nurses spend their days dealing with administrative tasks—documenting visits or scheduling appointments resulting from treatment plans. They’re also frustrated by their inability to apply their patients’ individual characteristics to the entire body of medical literature to develop personalized treatment plans.
This is what I believe AI will transform. It will empower providers with insights that enable them to create treatment plans tailored to the individual, not just the disease. It will free providers from routine tasks, allowing them to focus on making human connections with patients. AI is not about bringing more technology into healthcare. Rather, it’s about using technology to solve our most pressing problems so we can put the “human” back into healthcare.
