GE Healthcare unveiled its Edison Digital Health Platform on Wednesday, March 15th at the Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2022 annual meeting.

The vendor-agnostic hosting and data aggregation solution is designed to be a single platform for hospitals and healthcare systems to host and deploy clinical, workflow, analytics and AI apps into their workflow to improve care delivery, enhance operations and increase revenue. It helps simplify and makes easier the process of integrating and maintaining multiple, different apps in hospital environments.

It also is meant to reduce app installation and integration challenges for IT personnel by connecting devices and other information sources into an aggregated clinical data layer that can be accessed through apps. GE intends to integrate and deploy its own apps, such as Command Center “tiles”, onto the platform. Additionally, open and published interfaces will allow providers and third-party developers to seamlessly deploy their own apps, with the platform integrating them into existing workflows.

IT departments are expected to be able to access multiple databases through one connection, such as the EMR, during the first integration. Following this, they will be able to connect subsequent apps with less effort.

"The goal of Edison Digital Health Platform is to accelerate the adoption of multiple other digital solutions [apps] at the healthcare provider. By speeding up this adoption, providers should be able to move faster to improving patient care," Ken Dennison, VP of healthcare digital platform and product marketing at GE Healthcare, told HCB News.

The system offers services for data analytic applications and the training and deployment of AI models with the aggregated data. It also scales across cloud, server, data center and on-device deployment.

With it, providers can select best-in-class and preferred apps safely and securely and do not have to endure multiple individual integrations or be completely dependent on a single vendor. This reduces digital friction across the enterprise and accelerates the installation of digital solutions at scale for improved operational efficiency and better delivery of care.

"Edison Digital Health Platform is the enabler of many of the other products," said Dennison. "It is the infrastructure that makes it easy for GE Healthcare (and others) to develop and deploy applications faster. It’s a bit like iOS for your iPhone. Developers use it to develop more quickly and on the user end it makes it effortless to add apps on to your phone."

Premier systems integrator and GE Healthcare Strategic Alliance member Leidos will work with customers to seamlessly implement and ensure sufficient integrations.

“We expect Edison Digital Health Platform to be a game-changer for clinicians, particularly as it relates to patient data,” said Dr. Felix Nensa, a consultant radiologist at the University Hospital Essen and group leader at the Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, in a statement. “They will have the ability to have all of their patients’ data indexed and aggregated in one place, saving hours of time by reducing the need to search across various, disparate systems to access relevant patient information.”

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