With its new Edison Developer Program, GE Healthcare hopes to speed the adoption and utility of artificial and machine learning applications and developer services for health systems, the company announced this week.

WHY IT MATTERS
GE's Edison platform (named for the company's founder) is designed to help providers gain easier access to market-ready algorithms and apps by integrating them into existing workflows, and enable them to derive more value from their existing technologies.

With the new Edison Developer Program, GE Healthcare says it will offer a variety of services meant to help accelerate AI developers' ability to build models to improve operational and clinical outcomes – and also help them scale and deploy applications across GE's own customer base.

Edison technology helps GE Healthcare and select strategic partners design, develop, manage, secure and distribute apps and AI algorithms more quickly. The new developer program will expand the existing ecosystem of researchers, software developers, academic contributing applications, services and algorithms for the platform.

GE Healthcare has also announced several new Edison technologies – some of them developed with other vendors such as Arterys, iCAD, Koios Medical, MaxQ AI and Volpara – aimed at imaging workflows for CTs and MRIs, clinical decision support and more.

Officials say the Edison Developer Program offers new potentials for innovating secure device connectivity, data aggregation for clinical context, advanced visualization, workflow and AI orchestration and more.

The company notes that Edison is helping with world-class health systems such as Partners HealthCare, where GE is co-developing deep learning technologies at Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women's Hospitals, focused, among other areas, on cardiology, oncology and  various imaging modalities.

THE LARGER TREND
The Edison platform was first launched by GE Healthcare a year ago at RSNA (which kicks off its 105th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting next week in Chicago).

At the time, GE pointed out that 90 percent of healthcare data comes from imaging – but just 3 percent of that data actually gets analyzed or put to work. With the Edison platform, the company said it hoped to help improve those statistics.

ON THE RECORD
"We introduced Edison just one year ago at RSNA to help health providers take advantage of data in new and significant ways," said Kieran Murphy, president and CEO of GE Healthcare, in a statement. "With the introduction of the Edison Developer Program, and a suite of new intelligent applications and smart devices powered by Edison, we are building on that promise as we continue to work with partners to realize our collective goal of advancing the future of health."

"The Edison Developer Program is unique in its deep technology integration and scaling through the workflow, opening the door to faster adoption by health systems," added GE Healthcare Chief Digital Officer Amit Phadnis.

"Bringing together leading technology providers, developers and academic institutions under a single, connected ecosystem will help our customers simplify and optimize data aggregation and orchestration of clinical and operational applications in ways that have the potential to create real impact from the bottom line to better patient outcomes."