GE Healthcare introduced a vendor-agnostic hosting and data aggregation platform, with an integrated artificial intelligence (AI) engine.

The Edison Digital Health Platform—which was unveiled at HIMSS 2022—is being developed to enable hospitals and healthcare systems to effectively deploy the clinical, workflow, analytics and AI tools which would support the improvement of care delivery, the promotion of high-efficiency operations, and the increase of revenue growth. It would also support reduction in the IT burden that typically comes with installing and integrating apps across the enterprise.

Edison Digital Health Platform is designed to accelerate app integration by connecting devices and other data sources into an aggregated clinical data layer. A collection of data transformation services is expected to be available on the platform to support data analytic applications, and to enable the training and deployment of AI models using the aggregated data.

“We expect Edison Digital Health Platform to be a game-changer for clinicians, particularly as it relates to patient data,” says Felix Nensa, MD, a consultant radiologist at the University Hospital Essen and group leader at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine. “They will have the ability to have all of their patients’ data indexed and aggregated in one place, saving hours of time by reducing the need to search across various, disparate systems to access relevant patient information.”

Through open and published interfaces, healthcare providers and third-party developers are expected to be able to seamlessly deploy their applications, with the platform supporting integration of the apps into existing workflows. In addition, GE Healthcare intends to integrate and deploy its own apps such as Command Center “tiles” onto Edison Digital Health Platform.

“Edison Digital Health Platform is being designed to enable healthcare systems to have a single platform on which to host and integrate apps into clinical workflows,” says Amit Phadnis, chief digital officer, GE Healthcare. “With easy access to the workflow, analytics, and clinical apps specific to care across the care continuum, clinicians will have actionable insights at their fingertips to help better serve their patients.”

With a vendor-agnostic platform, providers would be able to select best-in-class and preferred apps safely and securely, without the typical requirement of multiple individual integrations or being locked into a single vendor. In addition, the platform is being designed to scale across cloud, server, data center or on-device deployment. Leidos, a preferred premier systems integrator and GE Healthcare Strategic Alliance member, will collaborate with customers on seamless implementations and appropriate integrations.

“We look forward to working alongside GE Healthcare to address health systems’ technology challenges from the growing demand for app integration,” says Liz Porter, president of Leidos Health Group. “The platform will help reduce digital friction across the enterprise and accelerate the deployment of digital solutions at scale. This will help healthcare providers improve efficiency and drive better care for patients.”