Amazon Web Services partners with General Catalyst to develop healthcare IT tools

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is joining forces with investment firm General Catalyst to codevelop and deploy integrated AI-powered offerings that focuses on critical needs in predictive and personalized care, interoperability, operational and clinical efficiency, diagnostics and patient engagement.

The companies plan to employ the power of generative AI using Amazon Bedrock and Anthropic and Mistral AI, along with securely trained health care-specific models.

According to the two companies, the alliance with AWS, as its preferred cloud provider, will enable General Catalyst to offer tools to healthcare systems with flexibility and scalability, leveraging AWS’s breadth and depth of service functionality, pace of innovation, reliability, security and data privacy. 

Meanwhile, AWS will bring its experience in deploying AI and machine learning across its thousands of healthcare and life sciences customers, as well as additional services built explicitly for healthcare and life sciences use cases such as (AWS HealthScribe, AWS HealthOmics and AWS HealthImaging).

General Catalyst portfolio companies Commure and Aidoc will integrate their specialized technology solutions like Copilot Suite and aiOS with AWS’s AI and data capabilities, which will enable health systems to deploy advanced, industry-specific cloud services to address critical needs at scale and speed.

“AWS and General Catalyst believe that AI has immense potential to affect meaningful change in global health care,” AWS CEO Matt Garman said in a statement. 

“Together, we are taking bold steps to improve patient outcomes and make quality care more accessible to all by embedding AI throughout the care journey.”

Hemant Taneja, CEO and managing director of General Catalyst, underscored the potential of the collaboration.

“At General Catalyst, we’ve witnessed firsthand how technologies like AI, applied with the right approach to scaling and problem-solving, can drive real transformation in health care,” Taneja said in a statement.

“AWS shares our bold vision for advancing human health through cutting-edge technology. Together, we believe this work will establish a flywheel of innovation and adoption that can be applied to other industries.”

THE LARGER TREND

In 2024, GE HealthCare formed a strategic partnership to use Amazon Web Services (AWS) healthcare and genAI services to build AI-enabled workflows that help improve the accuracy of diagnostic screening, streamline healthcare operations and improve equitable care access and outcomes. 

GEHC used Amazon Bedrock’s foundation models to create its own proprietary genAI applications and modernize its applications built on Amazon SageMaker.

In October, General Catalyst closed $8 billion in new capital, including $6 billion for its latest fund, Fund XII, and $2 billion in separately managed accounts. The $8 billion was used to boost the firm’s investments across various sectors, including defense and intelligence, climate and energy, AI, industrials, and healthcare and fintech.  

In September, General Catalyst formed the General Catalyst Institute. The aim of the organization is to work with governments and public policy leaders globally to facilitate the adoption of new technologies to create global resilience.

General Catalyst expanded the General Catalyst Institute into India last year. It focused on five key pillars, including using AI to address societal challenges and working with policymakers and entrepreneurs in order to build on India’s strengths in telemedicine and pharmaceuticals in order to impact the healthcare sector. 

Summa Health and General Catalyst’s Health Assurance Transformation HATCo, signed a definitive agreement in 2024, to purchase Summa for $485 million. The purchase price allowed the health system to dispose of $850 million in existing debt.