Amazon Web Services (AWS) has formed an artificial intelligence (AI)-centric health partnership with General Catalyst.
AWS says the collaboration, announced Monday (Jan. 13), combines its tech expertise with General Catalyst’s history of healthcare investments.
“AWS and General Catalyst believe that AI has immense potential to [effect] meaningful change in global health care,” AWS CEO Matt Garman said in a news release. “Together, we are taking bold steps to improve patient outcomes and make quality care more accessible to all by embedding AI throughout the care journey.”
According to the release, the partnership will focus on building and deploying AI-powered solutions to address crucial needs in predictive and personalized care, interoperability, operational and clinical efficiency, diagnostics and patient engagement.
The potential here is “vast,” the companies said, with plans to employ the power of generative AI using Amazon Bedrock and team with providers like Anthropic and Mistral AI as well as securely trained health care-specific models.
“One example is the ability to drive more personalized health care by using disease-specific models that process diverse health data—such as radiology and pathology scans, genomic sequencing information, clinical trial data, and electronic health records—to help doctors and researchers identify patterns and diagnose, make predictions about treatment outcomes, offer insights into disease progression, and more,” the release said.
Writing Monday about the intersection between generative AI (GenAI) and healthcare, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster posited a world in which “your doctor knows you’re getting sick before you do” and healthcare is more of a “proactive partnership” than a thing to worry about.
“GenAI has the potential to shift the conversation — and time and dollars spent — from how much it costs to make people well when they get sick to preventing illness before it even begins,” Webster wrote. “That will make the future of healthcare about using GenAI to better understand and prevent disease. Interactions with the patient will become patient-first and smart-technology driven.”
The economics, that report adds, are “compelling,” as U.S. healthcare costs — which came to nearly $5 trillion in 2023 — are projected to reach $7.7 trillion by 2032. Many consumers, especially younger ones, say they’ll skip or delay medical care because they can’t afford it.
“That’s not just expensive — it’s unsustainable,” Webster wrote.
“By using intelligent monitoring devices and personalized health insights, it’s possible to dramatically reduce the cost of chronic disease management. Medication can be remotely prescribed, administered and monitored as appropriate, staving off a full-blown, expensive and potentially physically debilitating medical crisis.”
Job cuts in government, technology and retail led the way as U.S. employers announced the largest number of cuts in one month since May 2020.
Among the 275,240 job cuts announced in March, 216,215 were in government, 15,055 were in technology and 11,709 were in retail, Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in a report released Thursday (April 3).
“Job cut announcements were dominated last month by Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) plans to eliminate positions in the federal government,” Andrew Challenger, senior vice president and workplace expert for Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in the report. “It would have otherwise been a fairly quiet month for layoffs.”
The total number of job cuts made in March was more than three times the 90,309 cuts announced in March 2024, according to the report.
By sector, compared to March 2024, government job cuts were almost six times higher, technology cuts were about 6% higher and retail cuts were nearly twice as high, per the report.
All the government job cuts made in March occurred in the federal government, the report said.
The top reason employers gave for cutting jobs in March was “DOGE impact,” which was cited for 216,670 of the month’s cuts, according to the report.
Other common reasons included store, unit or department closing, to which 17,666 job cuts were attributed, and market/economic conditions, which accounted for 11,594 cuts, per the report.
Challenger, Gray & Christmas also said in the report that employers are planning to hire fewer workers than they were a year ago. Companies’ hiring plans dropped by about 37%, from 21,102 in March 2024 to 13,198 in March 2025, according to the report.
The specter of uncertain job security may accelerate a spending pullback that is already in motion, PYMNTS reported Wednesday (April 2). Consumer confidence that was already shaken may have been further impacted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest snapshot of the labor market released Tuesday (April 1), which found that the labor market slowed in February, with a decline in job openings over the past year.
The Conference Board reported March 25 that consumer confidence slipped for the fourth straight month in March, due in part to a plunge in consumers’ short-term outlook for income, business and labor market conditions.
