The freshly spun-off GE HealthCare announced on Thursday that Dr. Taha Kass-Hout will be its inaugural chief technology officer.

WHY IT MATTERS
In creating the CTO role – and hiring a longtime health IT pioneer to fill it – the new GE HealthCare says it's proving a commitment to help its clients drive "innovation, growth and value through research and development."

In his new role, Kass-Hout will work with engineering and technology teams across GE HealthCare's four business units – imaging, ultrasound, patient care solutions and pharmaceutical diagnostics – to help machine learning applications and innovate their clinical research and patient-facing tools.

Kass-Hout, who will report to GE HealthCare president & CEO Peter Arduini, will be tasked with developing a digital health framework that emphasizes the company’s smart devices, aligned to specific disease states, and with driving data and insights to boost the company's ability to enable precision medicine and personalized care.

He has long experience in the healthcare space, in both private and public sectors. He comes to GE HealthCare from Amazon, where he served as both chief medical officer and VP of machine learning at AWS. There, he helped build AI-focused initiatives such as Amazon HealthLake, Amazon Comprehend Medical, and Amazon Omics.

Kass-Hout also served two terms in the Obama Administration – as the FDA’s first-ever chief health informatics officer, and as director of information science and informatics for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At GE HealthCare, he'll lead a multiyear enterprise-wide innovation and clinical strategy, according to the company, focused on new products that support clinical care pathways, R&D investment prioritization and more.

"As a cardiologist, digital and ML expert, Taha has exceptional clinical and technology experience," said Arduini in a statement. "Under his leadership, our new science and research organization will drive greater end-to-end alignment within our key research and product development segments to deliver innovative solutions that transform the future of healthcare and enhance our ability to enable precision care."

THE LARGER TREND
Kass-Hout's hiring comes as GE HealthCare announced this past week that its spinoff from GE is complete, and that GE HealthCare will begin trading as an independent company on the Nasdaq exchange.

Earlier this year GE HealthCare launched its Edison digital health and data aggregation platform at HIMSS22.

Also, read our 2021 Q&A with Kass-Hout, where he discussed how AI and machine learning are opening new pathways in personalized care, and offered suggestions for how CIOs and IT leaders should be prioritizing their forward-looking technology investments.

ON THE RECORD
"As a clinician, public servant, and digital health and ML expert, I am honored to join the GE HealthCare team, whose passion, purpose and commitment to lead the digital transformation and improve outcomes for patients and providers clearly aligns with mine," said Kass-Hout in a statement.

"I am excited about what lies ahead and the incredible opportunity to deliver on GE HealthCare’s purpose of creating a world where healthcare has no limits and establishing a new frontier in advancing diagnostics and personalized therapeutics to people."

Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS publication.