AWS and Philips Collaborate to Migrate Health Systems to Cloud

Health technology company Royal Philips and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have expanded their strategic collaboration to offer Philips’ integrated diagnostics portfolio in the cloud.

Having already transitioned 150 sites across North America and Latin America to Philips HealthSuite Imaging on AWS, Philips and AWS will now collaborate to accelerate that migration of health systems to the cloud and to expand the migration to Europe, the companies said in a Tuesday (Nov. 26) press release.

The Philips integrated diagnostics portfolio includes radiology, digital pathology, cardiology and artificial intelligence (AI) visualization solutions, according to the release.

“We’re working closely with clinicians to ensure workflows become more efficient and give back valuable time to healthcare providers,” Royal Philips CEO Roy Jakobs said in the release. “Collaborating with AWS helps us to innovate faster and deliver better care for more people.”

Philips’ cloud-based solutions offer a unified view of patient data that comes from different diagnostic sources and provide remote access to diagnostic, reporting and workflow orchestration tools, according to the release.

The company is also exploring ways to use generative AI to automate routine tasks and optimize workflows by, for example, allowing clinicians to use conversational language to create and revise reports that support diagnosis and quality of care, per the release.

“The collaboration between Philips and AWS gives healthcare providers scalable, secure-by-design cloud-enabled solutions to accelerate healthcare innovations,” AWS CEO Matt Garman said in the release.

“Combining Philips’ healthcare informatics portfolio with AWS generative AI capabilities gives clinicians access to imaging insights so they can deliver more effective and efficient care to patients anywhere, anytime, with best-in-class security and privacy.”

In another, separate collaboration, AWS and GE HealthCare teamed up to help clinicians improve diagnoses using AI. GE HealthCare will use AWS as its cloud provider, with plans to use the company’s healthcare and generative AI services to increase diagnostic and screening accuracy, improve outcomes, and provide greater access and equitable care.

In July 2023, AWS debuted a tool called AWS HealthScribe, saying the tool uses speech recognition and generative AI to generate clinical documentation. The tool helps clinicians save time summarizing patient visits by automatically creating transcripts, extracting details such as medical terms and medications, and creating summaries from doctor-patient discussions.