On Tuesday at the HIMSS conference in Orlando, Philips announced that it is expanding its relationship with AWS. The medical technology giant and the cloud provider are taking their collaboration up a notch with the goal of scaling digitized pathology slides in the cloud.
Philps selected AWS as its cloud partner “about seven years ago” and has been working with the company on ways to advance innovation since, said Shez Partovi, chief innovation and strategy officer at Philips, in an interview. For example, the partners began an effort last year to build generative AI tools for HealthSuite, Philip’s imaging archiving and communications system.
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This is certainly not the first time a major healthcare technology company has partnered with AWS to scale clinical innovation — companies including GE HealthCare, Baxter and Leidos have forged similar partnerships with the cloud vendor.
For the latest initiative announced by Philps and AWS, they seek to help pathology labs better store and analyze vast volumes of data, as well as adopt more streamlined, cloud-based workflows to reduce clinician burnout.
“About 70% of every clinical decision that’s made involves a pathologist making a diagnosis,” Partovi pointed out. “Treatment planning can’t happen without pathologists, and sadly, there’s a shortage of pathologists.”
Through the digitization of pathology slides, pathologists are able to work remotely. The ability to read slides remotely is something that will not only make pathologists’ work easier, but also prevent a lot of them from retiring prematurely, Partovi noted.
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Philip’s new phase of collaboration with AWS aims to create an infrastructure in which pathologists can receive large images remotely in a way that is “fast, secure and over the air,” he explained. The overarching goal is to advance the adoption of digital pathology workflows to boost productivity.
“Moving digital pathology to the cloud is a key part of the story because now you can upload the images to the cloud and they just stream directly to wherever you are,” Partovi declared.
Scaling digital pathology is important because processing slides the traditional way takes about nine hours, whereas that timeline can be reduced to about 30 minutes when digitized, he added.
Photo: Flickr user Francisco Gonzalez
