GE HealthCare announced it signed a $44 million contract  with the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA)—part of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—to develop and obtain regulatory clearance for next-generation advanced point-of-care ultrasound technology with new artificial intelligence (AI) applications. Technology resulting from this jointly funded program will help healthcare professionals at all skill levels rapidly diagnose and provide timely treatment for patients with lung pathologies and traumatic injuries to the abdomen, chest and head.

Trauma is a leading cause of death in the United States  posing an enormous burden to healthcare systems and society. Trauma patients’ survival is dependent on receiving timely and appropriate care. Injury detection and triage of trauma patients play key roles in successful patient care and resource management, both in everyday situations and in mass casualty events. Technologies that expedite care, including detection, evaluation, and decision-assist capabilities, potentially increase patients’ chances of survival.

“Point-of-care ultrasound is an essential tool in emergency situations to help clinicians quickly get the answers they need when treating patients,” said Roland Rott, President and CEO, Ultrasound, GE HealthCare. “We are grateful and excited for the opportunity to partner with BARDA to contribute our expertise in ultrasound and AI applications to develop innovative solutions for identifying a range of traumatic injuries and lung pathologies. Our collaboration has the potential to enhance the ability of clinicians to provide timely care for trauma patients even in the most dire scenarios.”

As part of the collaboration with BARDA, GE HealthCare will build new technology to expedite trauma triage and treatment, potentially transforming the standard of care. GE HealthCare will build upon its existing point-of-care ultrasound technology portfolio to develop an advanced probe and ultrasound system together with novel AI technology to ease acquisition and interpretation of ultrasound exams for users of all skill levels, thereby increasing the number of capable users and making delivery of care more efficient. The proposed devices will cover indications for multiple injury types: blunt and penetrating trauma, head trauma, lung injuries (including blast lung), as well as multiple lung pathologies encountered outside trauma care such as those seen in infectious diseases.

“GE HealthCare has been a leader to bring ultrasound to the emergency department and has a strong presence at the point of care with both traditional and handheld ultrasound systems,” said Dietmar Seifriedsberger, Global General Manager, Point of Care and Handheld Ultrasound, GE HealthCare. “Working with BARDA is another step toward realizing the enormous potential of ultrasound technology to help hospitals increase preparedness for mass casualty events, including a range of traumatic injuries and lung pathologies, as well as help improve treatment decision-making and enhance patient care.”

GE HealthCare will develop technology and AI applications to be compatible with select point-of-care ultrasound systems from its product portfolio to facilitate rapid assessment of patients across a wide range of environments and care settings.

Connecting two of the hottest trends in the enterprise-tech world, Google Cloud is rolling out industry-specific generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) solutions for healthcare and for manufacturing to help customers not only boost productivity but also transform themselves for the digital age.

Claiming that “82% of organizations considering or currently using gen AI believe it will either significantly change or transform their industry,” Google Cloud offered five use cases that can help manufacturing companies transform themselves to meet the demands of a turbulent and increasingly digital marketplace.

GenAI Use Cases in Manufacturing
Machine-generated events monitoring. Here’s the key excerpt from the Google Cloud blog post: “Gen AI can play a key role in transforming maintenance workflows and staying one step ahead with predictive maintenance. It helps manufacturers optimize operations by interpreting telemetry from equipment and machines to reduce unplanned downtime, gain operating efficiencies, and maximize utilization. If a problem is identified, gen AI can also recommend potential solutions and a service plan to help maintenance teams rectify the issue.”

Customer-service automation. Google Cloud says that manufacturers are finding that GenAI “provides a helpful, value-added customer service experience that automates and accelerates time-to-resolution for common interactions like product troubleshooting, ordering replacement parts, scheduling service, product information, and product operation.”

Document search and synthesis. “Gen AI can quickly sift through generations of documents throughout the product lifecycle, extracting and summarizing the information needed by sales teams and technicians,” the blog post says. “And it can synthesize purchase orders and quickly provide customers a quote, eliminating the need for sales teams to manually cross-reference emails with inventory availability.”

Product/content catalog discovery. Highlights from the blog post: “Gen AI-enabled sales applications can provide sales recommendations based on historical sales data, in-stock data, master data, and more…. Results could be combined with more descriptive statistics on sales data joined with meta-information that is uploaded by sales agents, giving a clear visibility into the buying process.”

Supply-chain advisor. “Gen AI can act as a supply chain advisor, providing greater visibility across complex networks and delivering recommendations for best-suited suppliers based on relevant criteria — such as bill of materials specifications, raw material availability and delivery schedules, or sustainability metrics,” according to the blog post. “Adept at extracting provisions using natural-language processing from legal and contractual documents, it can deliver real-time insights into supply chain performance to help improve decision-making.”

Healthcare: AI Helping Reimagine World’s Largest Industry
A separate Google Cloud blog post about its healthcare innovations gets right to the point about the incredibly strategic role GenAI has assumed in the largest industry on Earth: “In healthcare, AI is the most exciting technology we are working on today,” says the opening line. “From assisting clinicians with documentation, to streamlining operations, to accelerating medical research, to helping doctors detect diseases earlier, this remarkable technology holds the potential to reshape our world and promote healthier, more fulfilling lives.”

Industry-specific search for healthcare. Google Cloud has launched Vertex AI Search for healthcare because workers at all levels in that field “often struggle to find insights in clinical data across structured and unstructured data stores. Unstructured data such as patient notes and scanned documents, is particularly hard to search, and it’s easy to miss critical information. Moreover, you need expert clinical knowledge to know what data is even pertinent. These challenges make it hard to connect the dots and get the information necessary for quality patient care. What if technology could quickly bring all of the most relevant information and insights to clinicians?”

Who wouldn’t love a tailored and elegant “healthcare experience”? While the capabilities of modern healthcare organizations are remarkable, that level of quality rarely translates over to what we might call the customer experience or, more precisely the “patient experience.” So Google Cloud customer Highmark Health set out to deliver healthcare experiences “more like what you’d expect from a retailer, with a seamless, frictionless customer journey across online, mobile, and in-person experiences.” Called Living Health, the new model from Highmark Health “is exploring ways to adopt the technology to increase internal productivity and proficiency, make information more easily accessible to users, and improve the experience for clinicians and members.” Key technologies so far are Vertex AI, large language models, and other GenAI tools to personalize the experience for patients.

WELL Health Technologies Corp. a digital health company focused on tech-enabling healthcare providers, and its investee company, HEALWELL AI, are pleased to announce the launch of “WELL AI Decision Support”, a groundbreaking new service for healthcare providers.  This partnership is the first major collaborative initiative between the two companies since the announcement of the Strategic Alliance Agreement on October 3, 2023. Both companies view this as the beginning of a long-term, mutually beneficial partnership, with a shared vision and commitment to ongoing innovation.

Hamed Shahbazi, Founder and CEO of WELL commented, “We firmly believe the physician experience of the not-too-distant future will involve a number of safe, secure and helpful digital diagnostic tools that will better support healthcare providers in detecting acute and chronic diseases earlier.  The launch of ‘WELL AI Decision Support’ perfectly aligns with our core strategy to empower healthcare providers with transformative technology, enhancing their capacity to improve patient outcomes and promote preventative health.”

Dr. Michael Frankel, Chief Medical Officer of WELL, added, “The arrival of ‘WELL AI Decision Support’ marks more than just technological advancement; it’s a watershed moment in our pursuit of superior patient care. By harnessing AI’s potential, we are equipping healthcare professionals with tools that refine and elevate their practice. Each patient deserves individualized attention and precision in care, and this module is a step forward in realizing that vision.”

Dr. Alexander Dobranowski, CEO of HEALWELL AI, said, ” Our partnership with WELL is a strategic imperative in healthcare. The alignment between HEALWELL’s pioneering data science and WELL’s expansive clinical network underscores the strength of our collaboration. Together, with WELL’s robust healthcare software solutions, we are creating a synergy poised to redefine healthcare standards. This partnership amplifies our combined commitment to leveraging data science for healthcare applications, ultimately benefiting patients and healthcare providers alike.”

The ‘WELL AI Decision Support’ module is a groundbreaking solution that bridges a critical gap in healthcare diagnostics and patient care, heralding a new era of precision in healthcare delivery. WELL AI Decision Support leverages artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to enable the earlier diagnosis, treatment and improved quality of life for the patient. The technology behind WELL AI Decision Support has been meticulously developed by HEALWELL, in close collaboration with dedicated physicians, leading researchers, data privacy professionals, pharmaceutical companies, and other domain experts. This rigorous process of development and refinement has led to its validation in both Canadian and U.S. healthcare systems. WELL AI Decision Support is also a highly modular service that will be expanded with time.  Initially, the service enables healthcare providers to accurately identify over 110 complex or rare diseases often overlooked by traditional methods, providing hope to thousands of patients across Canada.

‘WELL AI Decision Support’ is the second significant product release under the WELLHealth.ai program, following the successful “WELL AI Voice” module, and further exemplifies WELL’s unwavering commitment and leadership in delivering effective AI solutions in healthcare. WELL AI Decision Support is featured on apps.health, WELL’s premium digital marketplace for EMR tools and applications.

Rare and complex diseases affect over 300 million patients worldwide, and in Canada, 1 in 12 individuals lives with a rare disorder. What’s even more alarming is the substantial number of people who remain undiagnosed and unaware of their underlying conditions. For those who do exhibit symptoms, the journey to a correct diagnosis is an arduous one. On average, they consult 8 physicians, endure 2-3 misdiagnoses over a span of 4.8yrs before receiving an accurate diagnosis.

This partnership represents a significant win for HEALWELL, granting expansive channel access to healthcare providers. The launch of ‘WELL AI Decision Support’ module underscores the trust and validation of HEALWELL’s expertise within the industry. Both WELL and HEALWELL plan to continue to collaborate to combine their expertise and capabilities for more groundbreaking developments in the future.

CareCloud, Inc., a leader in healthcare technology solutions for outpatient practices nationwide announced the launch of the first three features of CirrusAI, its innovative generative AI platform. CirrusAI is designed to serve as a digital healthcare assistant, helping to enhance clinical decision-making, streamline workflows, reduce administrative burdens, optimize revenue management, and promote patient-centered care.

CirrusAI is a state-of-the-art healthcare AI platform that was first introduced in July 2023. It is powered by Google Cloud’s Vertex AI and is poised to help reshape how healthcare professionals deliver patient care and manage their office workflows. CirrusAI will offer a comprehensive suite of features in the future. The initial functions of CirrusAI that were launched today include:

• AI-Powered Clinical Decision Support: Cirrus Guide automates clinical data input, and assists clinicians in workflow tasks, providing real-time, evidence-based recommendations and personalized suggestions via Vertex AI’s generative AI tools for providers to consider. This innovation can lead to enhanced diagnosis accuracy and treatment planning.
• AI-Powered Virtual Support Assistant: Cirrus Chat facilitates natural language conversations with practice staff members, offering valuable assistance in navigating CareCloud EHR workflows. This tool streamlines post-training and onboarding for new staff, reducing response times and providing real-time assistance, ultimately saving time.
• AI-Driven Appeals: Cirrus Appeals generates customized appeal letters by analyzing patient claim details, the appeal’s reason, and the specific payer involved for healthcare workers to review, edit, and send. This functionality supports CareCloud’s revenue cycle management (RCM) teams in optimizing providers’ RCM and securing proper reimbursement.
• CirrusAI seamlessly integrates with CareCloud’s electronic health record (EHR) solution, talkEHR, making it easily accessible to providers of all sizes. CirrusAI is also designed to be compatible with other EHR systems, and CareCloud plans to make it available soon on Google Cloud Marketplace. This would make it even easier for healthcare organizations and EHR providers to add CirrusAI to their workflows.

With more than two decades of expertise in the healthcare industry and an extensive repository of healthcare data, CareCloud is proficient at recognizing patterns in clinicians’ historical notes. Leveraging this data in a de-identified manner, CareCloud can create prompts that CirrusAI can use to craft personalized care plans that align with each provider’s unique writing style, terminology, and tone.

Adeel Sarwar, chief technology officer at CareCloud, said, “CirrusAI embodies our unwavering commitment to revolutionizing healthcare through the responsible and ethical use of cutting-edge AI technologies. We are actively developing additional features to complement this advanced suite, and our dedication to harnessing AI’s potential to improve patient care and transform the healthcare industry remains steadfast.”

“Bringing gen AI to its platform will equip smaller clinics and doctors’ offices with many of the same tech advantages of large hospital systems,” said Aashima Gupta, global director, Healthcare Strategy & Solutions for Google Cloud. “These advancements to CirrusAI will help physicians make highly informed decisions for optimal patient outcomes.”

Google Cloud’s customers retain control over their data. In healthcare settings, access and use of patient data is protected through the implementation of Google Cloud’s reliable infrastructure and secure data storage that support HIPAA compliance, along with each customer’s security, privacy controls, and processes. In addition, Vertex AI supports HIPAA compliance.

Every industry depends on unique insights to achieve their goals, and unlocking the power of data is the key to an organization’s success. This is especially true in healthcare, where data has the potential to do so much good – from improving health outcomes and enhancing patient and clinician experiences to driving better organizational performance for healthcare systems. When a patient’s or the population’s health is at the center of the decision-making process, having the right data strategy in place can have a life-changing impact on people’s lives.

Healthcare data continues to grow rapidly, and organizations are struggling to keep up with higher volume, greater variety and increased velocity. According to the World Economic Forum, hospitals produce 50 petabytes of siloed data per year – that’s equivalent to approximately 10 billion music files. Ninety-seven percent of this data goes unused, leaving many valuable insights locked away. Putting all this data to good use is the key to unlocking clinical and operational breakthroughs that can make a meaningful difference in the lives of patients and their healthcare journey. And in the new era of AI, the importance of data continues to grow as organizations realize that without a solid data strategy, they are only scratching the surface of what’s possible with AI.

At the HLTH 2023 conference, we’re introducing new data and AI solutions and capabilities that will help healthcare organizations stay focused on improving patient and clinician experiences while delivering quality care more efficiently and at a lower cost. Together, these new solutions offer healthcare organizations a unified, safe and responsible approach to their data and AI strategy and enable them to take advantage of the breadth and scale of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare.

Unifying data analytics to drive business value and better patient care
In May of this year, we unveiled Microsoft Fabric – an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics tools that organizations need to unlock the potential of their data and lay the foundation for the era of AI. Today, through the power of Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, we are introducing the first industry-specific data solutions in Fabric that unify data and insights through one common architecture and experience. Now available in preview, the healthcare data solutions in Fabric eliminate the costly, time-consuming process of stitching together a complex set of disconnected, multimodal health data sources – text, images, video, etc. – and provides a secure and governed way for organizations to access, analyze and visualize data-driven insights across their organization.

Microsoft Fabric gives healthcare organizations:

• The ability to combine data from previously siloed sources across their organization, such as electronic health records (EHRs), Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), labs systems, claims systems and medical devices. The solution brings structured, unstructured, imaging and medical device data into the Fabric data lake with open data standards using FHIR, DICOM and MedTech services, providing customers with one common architecture. Additionally, connectors and converters make it easier to transform FHIR, DICOM and MedTech data from one format to another or build pipelines for specific use cases.
• A multimodal data foundation that allows them to build standardized, scalable solutions that help accelerate the process of uncovering impactful clinical and operational insights and ultimately drive better patient care. Fabric helps create a single data estate where health data can live and be used to build and run AI models, as well as derive insights.
• Standard capabilities like Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) analytics enable clinical research and patient outreach analytics help provide more personalized engagement with patients.
• A new de-identification service will allow organizations to de-identify clinical data, keeping patient-protected health information (PHI) private by using machine learning models to extract, redact or surrogate identifiers while unlocking insights from unstructured data, such as doctor’s notes, medical documents and clinical trial studies.
• In addition, through healthcare-specific pre-built classification rules, labels and data glossaries in Microsoft Purview (preview), healthcare organizations can govern, protect and manage their entire data estate.

Organizations across the healthcare spectrum can benefit from Microsoft Fabric, with early adopters already planning to leverage the analytics platform to help advance some of their most prominent use cases:

• Northwestern Medicine, Chicago’s premier integrated academic health system, will leverage the healthcare data solutions in Fabric to integrate clinical data across a variety of sources, meet regulatory mandates for information exchange, and unlock insights with data and AI, helping further their patients-first mission with high quality and timely care.
• Arthur Health plans to use Fabric to power predictive care stage models in partnership with Quisitive for the Ontario Workers Network (OWN). OWN is a provincial network of hospitals, including Ottawa Hospital, and has experienced clinicians that provide world-class care for workers in their own communities.
• SingHealth, Singapore’s largest network of public healthcare institutions, aims to harness the power of Fabric’s healthcare data solutions for its underlying data infrastructure. This will help to transform the delivery of healthcare to provide excellent care and services to the population and patients, empowering them to take care of their own health and healthcare.

New AI capabilities that empower patients and simplify medical jargon
Within Azure AI services, we are releasing new healthcare capabilities that will help organizations maximize the value of AI to increase positive impact on patient outcomes:

• Helping clinicians and researchers make informed decisions – Azure AI Health Insights is a cognitive service that provides prebuilt models that perform analysis and provide inferences that can be reviewed and used by clinicians and researchers to facilitate patient care during important healthcare scenarios.

We are launching three new models in preview, including patient timeline, which uses generative AI to extract key events from unstructured data, such as medications, diagnosis and procedures, and organizes them chronologically to give clinicians a more accurate view of a patient’s medical history to better inform care plans. Clinical report simplification uses generative AI to give clinicians the ability to take medical jargon and convert it into simple language while preserving the full essence of the clinical information so that it can be shared with others, including patients. Radiology insights provides quality checks through feedback on errors and inconsistencies. The model also identifies follow-up recommendations and clinical findings within clinical documentation with measurements (sizes) documented by the radiologist.

• Bringing generative AI to healthcare chatbots and virtual assistants – This new preview capability in Azure AI Health Bot provides out-the-box healthcare intelligence that can be customized and connected into existing workflows, using answers from a healthcare organization’s own content sources, as well as leveraging generative AI to provide answers from credible sources like the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
• Extracting and labeling medical data to identify meaningful insights – Text Analytics for health, an Azure AI Language service, applies machine learning intelligence to extract and label essential medical information from a variety of unstructured texts. Newly released industry open source templates include population health, patient population Q&A using Azure OpenAI Service, clinical trials patient cohorts and mass historic data processing.

AI-powered solutions empower clinicians to deliver quality, personalized care
U.S. health systems are turning to AI-powered solutions to alleviate administrative burden and the resulting clinician burnout, which rose to 53% among physicians in 2023 compared to 42% in 2018, according to Medscape’s 2023 survey. To address this burnout, and empower clinicians to focus on delivering high-quality personalized care, we announced the general availability of Dragon Ambient eXperience (DAX™) Copilot, formerly known as DAX Express.

DAX Copilot, part of the larger Nuance Dragon family of solutions used by more than 550,000 users worldwide, allows clinicians to create draft clinical summaries automatically and securely in seconds from exam room or telehealth conversations for immediate review and entry in the EHR.

Atrium Health was the first to deploy Nuance DAX Copilot to its primary care physicians with plans for a broad rollout across its footprint. Physicians are already reporting saving meaningful time in their documentation tasks for each patient visit. In particular, Atrium Health clinicians are reporting that physicians are already saving up to 40 minutes per day with this advanced documentation technology. Additionally, 68% have recognized an improved experience providing care..

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare in the era of data and AI
These new industry innovations in data and AI are strengthened through Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, which enables healthcare organizations to accelerate their data and AI journey by augmenting the Microsoft Cloud with industry relevant data solutions, application templates and AI services. Our offerings can also be customized by an unmatched global ecosystem of trusted partners. We work with leading ISVs and system integrators so that our healthcare customers have complete solutions that address their unique business challenges.

Our healthcare solutions are built on a foundation of trust and Microsoft’s Responsible AI principles. Through these innovations, we are making it easier for healthcare organizations to create connected experiences at every point of care, provide tools that foster collaboration, empower the healthcare workforce, and unlock the value from clinical and operational data using data standards that are important to the healthcare industry.

Emmes,a global, full-service Contract Research Organization (CRO) dedicated to supporting the advancement of public health and biopharmaceutical innovation, announces the addition of telehealth capabilities within Advantage eClinical. The new application means any scheduled visit can become virtual with video calls augmented directly through the platform and patients signing in through their existing participant portal. Advantage eClinical is designed to enable a simple, intuitive experience that fits seamlessly into the everyday lives of study participants and sites.

The addition of telehealth capabilities is part of a much wider development plan for Emmes’ third generation clinical data platform. The company’s vision is to create the first unified, flexible, digital trial infrastructure that minimizes disruption for sites and participants and is more accessible. Our single, flexible platform accommodates all trial modalities – traditional, decentralized including hybrid and fully virtual – as well as the needs of patients, sponsors and sites. It also includes all tasks from data capturing, cleaning, monitoring, to workflow management, sample tracking and even clinical assessment and engagement tools.

“What we are building with Advantage eClinical is more than an EDC or eCOA/ePRO. It’s a platform to accelerate the delivery of all types of trial designs through one unified, modular system. 90% of respondents in the Center for Information and Study on Clinical Research Participation’s (CISCRP) 2021 Perception and Insights Study stress the importance of having options for completing study visits, such as virtual and home visits. By eliminating the need for sponsors to procure and set up additional point decentralized trial (DCT) systems, we hope more studies will offer patient-centric options for patients to participate,” commented Ching Tian, chief innovation officer at Emmes.

Ashley Davidson, Emmes associate vice president, product management and operations, explained that the telehealth application makes workflow far simpler for site staff because all information is on screen at the same time, including assessment forms and patient records. She added, “It gives that real world feel of an in-person visit and enables simultaneous note-taking and record-checking. On a more practical level, operating a decentralized or hybrid trial design means we can also open up trials to more diverse groups of participants, which has been a big driver from the regulators.”

Advantage eClinical is cloud-based and 21 CFR Part 11, GDPR and HIPAA compliant. It is available as a standalone product – software as a service (SaaS) – for any biopharma customer and CRO, and has supported more than 1,000 trials, for nearly one million patients in over 70 countries, spanning more than 31,000 clinical trial sites.