This year's HIMSS conference featured a variety of news announcements — from acquisitions to new product launches to advanced partnerships. In this list, MedCity News compiled short summaries for six of the conference's most notable announcements.
At HIMSS, Philips and AWS announced that they are expanding their collaboration with the goal of scaling digitized pathology slides in the cloud. The partners 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.
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
AWS is funneling an additional $20 million into its health equity initiative, bringing the company’s total investment in the program to $60 million. As AWS continues to advance the mission of this program, the company is focusing on three main priorities: increasing access to high quality care, building resilient communities, and mitigating the harmful effects of climate change.
At RSNA 2023, AI startup Hoppr announced that it teamed up with AWS to launch a new foundation model. The product, named Grace, is a B2B model designed to help application developers build better AI solutions for the medical imaging field — and to build them more quickly.
Amazon recently unveiled HealthScribe, an API that software companies can use to create clinical note generation apps that providers can later adopt. With this approach, Amazon is seeking to collaborate with companies that are building clinical documentation AI apps rather than compete with them. Some think this approach is clever, but others think it does little to facilitate bi-directional EHR integration and create standardization.
Last fall, AWS announced that it was launching a new accelerator to support startups that develop technology to help the healthcare sector address its challenges with workforce deployment, retention and training. At ViVE, the company unveiled which 23 startups have been selected to take part in the accelerator.
In an era of escalating healthcare costs and a growing preference for natural, holistic approaches to health, The Impact Brands emerges as a collective of diverse brands dedicated to supporting overall wellness through natural means.
The innovation institute run by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill teamed up with Amazon Web Services to create a venture studio to turn the university’s digital health research concepts into full-fledged startups. AWS’ platform beat out the other major cloud providers because it was “the most entrepreneurial,” according to the venture studio’s managing director.
The hogwash started in The Wall Street Journal with a contrarian take on a recent KPMG technology report. But cloud operates in a fundamentally different paradigm from the IT infrastructure of the past, and embracing big change is rarely free or easy. But the rewards of evolving are obvious and far too great to ignore.
PeerCapsule, a Phoenix-based company developing a collaboration platform for professional healthcare associations, recently received funding from AWS' accelerator for early-stage startups led by founders from underrepresented groups. The startup will use the money to scale its platform and help build tools to enable faster clinical research.
Grail, a company focused on early cancer detection, introduced its test that screens for more than 50 kinds of cancer last year. At AWS' Thursday conference for healthcare and life sciences innovation, the company's chief security officer explained how the company is evaluating the test in clinical trials and preparing to file for its FDA approval.
The TSX Venture Exchange has a strong history of helping early-stage health and life sciences companies raise patient capital for research and development.
AWS may be emerging as the healthcare sector’s cloud darling, as healthcare customers are reporting high levels of satisfaction and large health systems are beginning to ink long-term cloud partnership plans. Healthcare organizations that choose AWS over its competitors do so because they believe it’s the most mature and healthcare-focused cloud platform, according to a KLAS report released Tuesday.
Dr. Shafiq Rab and John Kravitz, executives at Tufts Medicine and Geisinger, said AWS will offer them better connectivity speed and business continuity than other cloud vendors.
By leveraging aligned interoperability partners, health systems can alleviate the inevitable pressures of IT personnel shortages and the strains that labor fluctuation puts on organizational technology transformation and growth.
Google is piloting its healthcare data engine, a tool intended to build longitudinal patient records and pull in data from multiple sources. Early work with Mayo Clinic served as a foundation for the technology.
Both cloud competitors are offering solutions that use FHIR to pull together and standardize health data from disparate sources. Google recently unveiled a solution based on its work with Mayo Clinic.