Dive Brief:
- GE HealthCare has partnered with a Mass General Brigham research team to use generative artificial intelligence to support radiation therapy teams.
- The collaboration, which GE HealthCare disclosed last week, focuses on using generative AI to enable radiation oncologists to query structured clinical data and unstructured information.
- Generative AI could summarize a patient’s treatment journey to help clinicians navigate complex data, make decisions and deliver personalized care, GE HealthCare said.
Dive Insight:
GE HealthCare framed the project as a response to the complexity and fragmentation of care pathways for radiation therapy. The length and complexity of treatment, plus the number of care teams involved, mean radiation oncology staff work across multiple systems and sources of information. Those sources “rarely connect,” GE HealthCare said.
Responding to the challenges, the company developed software for unifying workflows. Massachusetts General Hospital created a component of the system, helping the healthcare provider to cut the time from patient intake to the start of treatment from 30 days to eight days.
Working with a team at Mass General Brigham, GE HealthCare aims to add generative AI capabilities to its software. The partners plan to combine structured healthcare data with information such as clinical notes, images and treatment plans. By pairing the repository with a generative AI tool, GE HealthCare hopes to equip healthcare professionals to question the data and surface relevant information quickly.
The collaboration builds on the existing software by exploring “how AI could help clinicians not only work more efficiently but also make better use of the information available to them as they personalize treatment for each patient,” Sam Kandala, general manager for therapy guidance at GE HealthCare, said in a statement.
Kandala’s belief that generative AI could personalize care reflects the potential for the technology to help clinicians access patient-specific information. Currently, healthcare teams can struggle to quickly find and synthesize unstructured information, potentially contributing to delays in patient care, the company said.
GE HealthCare’s project comes as more medtech companies are looking to incorporate generative AI into medical devices. This has brought up questions about how generative AI should be regulated. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration called for feedback on how to regulate a technology that it warned may introduce “unique risks.”
