Partners with Key Players to Advance Medical Imaging-google
Medical imaging is a critical pillar of modern healthcare: It’s estimated that more than 300 million advanced imaging procedures are performed a year, and the majority of medical interventions require some type of imaging for diagnostic purposes. Next to genomics, medical images are one of the fastest growing data sources in the healthcare space.
And in this direction, at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) meeting in Chicago this week, several IT companies struck or extended deals with Google Cloud aimed at helping hospitals tackle the storage challenges posed by precision medicine, improve radiology workflows, bring machine learning to imaging analytics and more.
Change Healthcare, for one, has extended a strategic partnership with Google Cloud to develop new tools for radiologists and other imaging professionals, exploring how artificial intelligence can better be brought to bear on clinical workflows and analytics projects.
In its partnership with Change Healthcare, Google Cloud hopes to integrate the company’s artificial intelligence technology with Change Healthcare’s imaging expertise to give health providers more “data-driven insights.”
Change Healthcare will also have access to use Google Cloud’s G Suite to allow physicians to better share medical images.
“Change Healthcare is positioned to transform the value that imaging brings to healthcare providers. By working with Google Cloud in this strategic collaboration, we are poised to accelerate that transformation,
” said Erkan Akyuz, executive vice president and president for Imaging, Workflow & Care Solutions, Change Healthcare. “In today’s dynamic healthcare industry, providers are looking for new ways to improve patient care. That is why Change Healthcare will be working with Google Cloud to introduce innovative technologies and solutions to address the challenges healthcare providers face both today and in the future.”The relationship between Change Healthcare and Google Cloud will help enable easier and more natural collaboration for caregivers and provide deeper insights through pragmatic machine-learning solutions. These capabilities will be built on a broad cloud-based imaging data infrastructure that has the potential to be more cost-effective and reliable than other solutions available today. Change Healthcare’s ecosystem of technology, processes, and expertise can help its customers reduce costs, increase effectiveness, and may ultimately help improve patient and provider outcomes.
“Change Healthcare is a well-established leader in healthcare innovations, and we are excited by the opportunity that this strategic relationship offers to the industry,” said Gregory Moore, M.D., Ph.D., vice president, Healthcare, Google Cloud. “We look forward to working with Change Healthcare to help them serve their customers, which include some of the largest and most complex healthcare providers.”
Google is also partnering with Dicom Systems to launch a hybrid cloud vendor archive, de-identification and imaging data supply chain platform. The platform, which will be called the Universal Cloud Archive Adaptor, is designed to streamline the cloud adoption process and enable health systems to better store images.
Now available on Google Launcher, customers can deploy the Dicom Systems Universal Cloud Archive Adaptor in minutes to test drive the cloud-based medical imaging library. Customers pay only for what they use and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) may yield up to 60% operating cost savings over other cloud providers. As an added incentive, optional participation in a de-identified imaging data lake earns customers a rebate on their operating cost.
The Universal Cloud Archive Adaptor was designed to make cloud adoption simple while solving a number of concerns for healthcare organizations. The solution integrates with PACS, RIS, and EMR systems. There are no migration costs or termination fees.
“We are setting our sights on a distinct segment of the imaging data supply chain: enabling machine learning and building neural networks that can ultimately supplement the work of physicians,” said Florent Saint-Clair, Executive Vice President of Dicom Systems. “As an industry, we’re just beginning to understand the building blocks necessary to design effective and reliable AI in imaging diagnostics. We could not have found a better, no-nonsense cloud provider than Google Cloud to deliver our vision. On their powerful infrastructure, we’re able to offer competitive pricing as well as a data rebate when our customers contribute their de-identified images for use. The data lake then becomes a unique source of raw data that can be used by AI researchers everywhere.”
Beyond the Change Healthcare and DICOM Systems deals, Gregory J. Moore, MD, vice president of healthcare at Google Cloud, highlighted initiatives such as the one Kanteron Systems is pursuing with Google Cloud Platform in his blog post. Kanteron, which specializes in clinical genomics, is leveraging Google’s cloud-based AI to make tools for radiologists, pathologists, oncologists and surgeons to bring precision medicine data to the point of care.
Other Google partners – Ambra Health, lifeIMAGE, Nautilus Medical – are using cloud technology to expand and improve their medical image sharing networks, said Moore. And other companies, such as Zebra Medical Vision are using Google’s TensorFlow open source library and Cloud Machine Learning Engine as they train neural networks on existing radiology scans and develop new models to help clinicians detect specific conditions.
