As 130-year-old General Electric has seen its fortunes decline since the 2008 recession, new Chief Executive Officer Larry Culp will spin out its most profitable divisions into separate business entities focused on healthcare, energy, and aviation. Additionally, GE Healthcare took a step further into digital health by launching its new Edison Digital Health Platform earlier this year.
The new platform, which was launched at the 2022 Healthcare Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) conference, is geared toward healthcare organizations and aggregates and integrates patient data from multiple sources into existing workflows for easier provider access. It also offers a tool that enables providers to perform analytics necessary for making data-driven decisions.
Typically, making use of many healthcare applications requires contracting with vendors for each app to provide customized integrations, resulting in an expensive and time-consuming process that carries the additional security risk of exposing patient data through so many different channels. The new Edison system has been described as working as a smartphone, providing users with the ability to access in one place multiple apps that are automatically integrated with the platform.
“We expect Edison Digital Health Platform to be a game-changer for clinicians, particularly as it relates to patient data,” said Felix Nensa, M.D., a Consultant Radiologist at the University Hospital Essen, in a statement by the company. “They will have the ability to have all of their patients’ data indexed and aggregated in one place, saving hours of time by reducing the need to search across various, disparate systems to access relevant patient information.”
GE Healthcare also intends to integrate its Command Center software into the platform, offering providers the ability to perform patient management and planning in one place. Edison currently draws on data from electronic medical record (EMR) systems and other sources, with billing data, digital pathology, and wearables data being integrated at a future date. The firm also announced a partnership with AliveCor to integrate data from its remote monitoring ECG devices into GE Healthcare’s MUSE cardiac management system.
While the official spinout of GE Healthcare is not set for completion until early 2023, it’s clear that the division is moving aggressively to build out an extensive offering well before then. Should the spinout prove successful, investors and customers alike could see GE return to its former glory over the coming years.
