GE Healthcare’s booth is seen ahead of the 2022 China International Trade Fair in Services (CIFTIS) to be held at the China National Convention Center in Beijing, China on August 28, 2022.
Yi Haifei | China News Service | Getty Images
GE Healthcare On Monday, it announced a new artificial intelligence application that it says can save doctors time when diagnosing and treating cancer.
The tool, called CareIntellect for Oncology, helps oncologists understand a patient’s medical history and disease progression by quickly displaying the data they need, the company said. GE Healthcare wants to free oncologists from the headache of reviewing records so they can focus on patient care, the company said.
Analyzing healthcare data is notoriously difficult, with 97% of the data hospitals generate going unused, according to a Deloitte report. That information is stored across numerous vendors and file formats, including images, lab results, clinical records, and device measurements, and it can be a daunting task for physicians to organize. There is a gender.
“This is very time-consuming and very frustrating for clinicians,” Dr. Taha Kashout, global chief science and technology officer at GE Healthcare, said in an interview with CNBC.
CareIntellect for Oncology will be able to summarize clinical reports and identify when patients are deviating from their treatment plan, Kashout said. For example, the system can flag if a patient misses a lab test, so doctors can decide on the best next step.
“For cancer patients, treatment can last for years and require multiple visits to the doctor,” he said.
GE Healthcare’s CareIntellect for Oncology
GE Healthcare Provided
CareIntellect for Oncology also helps identify relevant clinical trials in which patients may participate, saving oncologists time, said Chelsea Bain, vice president of digital products at GE Healthcare. This process has traditionally required doctors to scroll through a database of available trials, memorize inclusion and exclusion criteria, and dig into patient records to determine appropriate suitability, Vain told CNBC. .
“What we did was get rid of it,” she said.
The new app aims to save oncologists time and effort, but if doctors want to learn more, CareIntellect for Oncology allows them to view the original records being referenced, the company said.
GE Healthcare plans to make CareIntellect for Oncology widely available to U.S. customers in 2025, initially optimized for prostate and breast cancer. Health organizations such as Tampa General Hospital are already evaluating it, the company said. Because the tool is cloud-based, it will drive recurring revenue for GE HealthCare, Kashout said.
Kashout said the company plans to introduce additional apps under the CareIntellect brand in the future. He added that oncology tools are the first product and will make it easy for healthcare providers to choose which apps they want to enable.
GE Healthcare also wants to integrate its CareIntellect product with some of the other early-stage AI initiatives it announced Monday.
The company highlighted five new AI products in development, including a collaborative team of AI agents, a tool to predict recurrence in advanced breast cancer, and a tool to more quickly report suspicious mammography scans to radiologists.
GE HealthCare decided to preview the new tool to give customers an idea of the problem the company is trying to solve, Kashout said. The company will seek feedback from healthcare providers and work with regulators as necessary, he said.
For example, GE HealthCare is exploring how groups of AI agents can work together as a team to support physicians through a tool called Health Companion.
Health Companion agents are trained as experts in specific fields, such as radiology, pathology, and genomics, and will provide insights based on their expertise, Kashout said. For example, he added, the agent could identify whether a particular symptom is a side effect of a treatment or a sign of disease progression and suggest next steps.
Ideally, the tool would be able to provide the same kind of support that physicians would expect when working with a multidisciplinary team, Kashout said. However, whereas consulting a panel of experts can take days or weeks, Health Companion is readily available.
“At this point, it’s an early concept,” he said. “Our goal is to improve the standard of care and reduce the burden on clinicians caring for patients.”
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