Q&A: GE HealthCare explores AI and healthcare innovations during JPM

Abu Mirza, global SVP of digital products and engineering at GE HealthCare, sat down with MobiHealthNews during the JPM Healthcare Conference in San Francisco to discuss the company’s use of AI and smart technologies and its work to enhance patient care, streamline operations and address challenges like cybersecurity and workforce shortages. 

MobiHealthNews: You mentioned to MHN that JPM is a unique conference. What do you think makes it unique?

Abu Mirza: We come to these conferences with two missions in mind. First of all, we are always looking to understand, how do we expand our portfolio when it comes down to the care journey? Selling a device is not what our mission is; it is to understand, how can we help in the cardiology area? How can we help in the neurology area? And as we think about our strategy, we invest a lot into making those devices smarter. And the next thing that we think about is, how do we embed AI and intelligence that makes the care journey better? And last, but not least is what the macro and micro trends are that we are seeing because there is a lot of innovation happening. Neuro is an interesting topic, obviously pharmaceuticals and others – all those things actually play a critical role for us to understand, how do we define and design our strategy? So, that’s kind of the big part of what we do.

MHN: What innovation in healthcare interests you, and what are you nervous about?

Mirza: The first question is, what excites me? I joined GE HealthCare two years back. Before that, I was at AWS for 10 years. I led SageMaker, the machine learning platform. So, from very close, I have seen digital transformation as it comes down to AI and ML in many verticals. I worked with large customers in retail, large customers that stream movies to your house, and also banks and pharmaceuticals and other stuff.

During COVID, it was an interesting turnaround point for me while I was working with big vaccine providers and other stuff, how much technology can actually impact people’s life, and that was the trigger for me to join healthcare. And I’m very impressed. GE HealthCare has a 5 million install base, and we touch about a billion people every year. That’s extremely inspiring for me.

This is a new area. We do believe that we have some advantage to our ability because we have been doing AI for a long time. We have established a set of frameworks. We need to innovate and also iterate on those frameworks so that we can enable the next generation of AI for our hospital system. So that’s the second part.

I think the third part is how we improve access. Our care journey is going beyond the walls of the hospitals. How do you help people coming into the hospital in the right way with the right level of directions, and how do you help them to get out of the hospitals and continue the same care outside of it? So, those are the things I think that need to be sorted out for our patients. 

So with that background, with being able to spend almost a decade in the cloud, one of my missions is to help GE HealthCare accelerate their cloud journey. The opportunity in the cloud comes in many different forms, but primarily hospital systems and health systems are recognizing how to take advantage of the cloud. Pre-COVID, there was a lot of hesitations for many good reasons. I think COVID worked as an accelerator. Now everybody is like, well, it’s not a question of whether I need to do it – I need to do it. How do I prioritize it? What do we get done? The innovation that excites me is this combination of capability of AI that is accelerated and enabled through the cloud.  

No. 2 is our ability to really work closely with customers. GE HealthCare is a 100-plus-year company. We have built a lot of trust with our customers, whether it be care providers or health systems, and with their feedback and input, we’re able to try out a lot of new ideas, and some of them could be improving your scan time.  

As I said, we touch 1 billion patients. Many of them go through imaging systems. So, improving the scan time by up to 50% through our product, like AIR Recon DL, it’s a significant impact for patients. That means a patient doesn’t have to wait 10 more minutes in the machine. We do millions of scans a year. If you reduce the time by 50%, that means the throughput is better. So there is a kind of a Venn diagram where patient experience and hospital efficiency gets better. In my mind, that’s the area that I’m most excited about.  

What you’re going to see and what we’re seeing as COVID has stabilized, a lot of stability needs to happen – financial stability, workforce stability, hospital systems are very strained. I am seeing that now. They’re kind of getting out of that compressed scenario and looking for opportunities that can make the care delivery better. However, it starts with the care teams. How do you make the care team’s life better? The burden that we have, the data to use that we have, the operational efficiency and challenges that we have, the staffing challenges that we have, how do you solve them? So those are the places we are innovating.  

To the second part of the question, what is concerning? A few things. like one of the things is that we have an enormous amount of spike in cyberattacks across health systems. When we talk to our hospital systems, the CIOs and chief data officers and new roles, they are very concerned about it. And so we’re working with them, making sure that solutions that we develop address those gaps, and responsible AI is going to be a big part of it.

MHN: How can GE HealthCare help health systems avoid cyberattacks?

Mirza: Our approach has been to work with the best-in-class solutions in the industry. So, we have some strategic partnerships with cloud providers like AWS. When we build our cloud solutions, we take enormous pride in the diligence that we do, and we make sure that we influence our partners’ technology providers, so that those things are built in within our product. 

Also, when we work with hospital systems, we go through a very rigorous systems integration processes and automation that’s around it so we can make sure that we do those things there. Cybersecurity is an infinite game because it’s going to continue to be challenging things there. So the trick is not only to build the solution that works today, but also build the right level of monitoring in the hooks in designing a zero trust system.

MHN: What’s in store this year for GE HealthCare?

Mirza: We launched CareIntellect for Oncology last year. We’re going to expand that and add more capabilities. We’re working really hard on the operations side. How do we improve operational efficiency? You will see a lot of discussions. 

[With] our command center project, we’re adding a lot of new capabilities. We’re adding more AI into it, and we’ve been very thoughtful about how we make this AI really effective. The inaccuracy and effectiveness of your AI depends on your training data, so we’re trying to partner with our hospital systems and say, “How can we make sure that we can develop this algorithm with the data that we have approval from and within the regulatory guidance?” 

We are also partnering with companies by purchasing data. So, we have somewhere between 3,000 to 4,000 hospitals’ data that we are using as base datasets to train our model. So those things are really exciting. And I believe that, you know, once we get this out to our customers, they can really improve the efficiency of the care team.