Delivering Comprehensive Enterprise Imaging from the Cloud

Philips recently partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop Philips HealthSuite Imaging

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Having the most efficient clinical workflows with enhanced diagnostic capabilities is a major goal for clinicians and referring physicians.

They need fast, secure access to both patient data and their diagnostic or viewing tool set. But the cost barriers and the complexity of owning and maintaining healthcare information systems can compromise the quality of care.

To address this challenge, Philips recently partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to develop Philips HealthSuite Imaging — a new radiology cloud service that provides on-demand access to advanced medical imaging software.

Philips and AWS are building on their relationship, advancing artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare to accelerate the development of cloud-based generative AI applications that provide clinical decision support, help enable more accurate diagnoses, and automate administrative tasks.

“With healthcare systems under increasing pressure, the focus of clinicians’ has shifted from technical specifications toward more efficient workflows that lead to accurate diagnoses – and that’s what we are delivering here,” said Shez Partovi, Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer and Business Leader Enterprise Informatics at Philips.

Comprehensive Enterprise Imaging

The availability of Philips HealthSuite Imaging on AWS is a new addition to Philips’ broad capabilities in enterprise informatics, enabling improved image access speeds, reliability and data orchestration for radiologists and clinicians across the entire imaging workflow – from diagnosis to therapy selection, treatment and follow-up.

With Philips HealthSuite Imaging, clinicians can access the latest innovations from any location, and healthcare organizations can reduce costs previously invested in on-premises hardware or data centers to host their image management platform.

This can help clinicians manage growing workloads amid staff shortages and speed time to diagnosis and treatment, enhancing patient outcomes.

Other key benefits that Philips HealthSuite Imaging offers include:

Effective remote workflows and reading: Create a virtual community of healthcare professionals to enhance patient care. Read, report and collaborate from virtually anywhere without compromising security, efficiency or quality.
Business continuity: Mission critical imaging departments can be protected with alternative resilience plans that deliver an “always on” service.
Security: Protect the organization’s technology from becoming obsolete by outsourcing IT infrastructure while keeping it secure and scalable.
Scalable and Future ready: The ability to scale up and add services any time with continuous access to the latest features.

According to Madhuri Sebastian, Business Leader, Philips Radiology Informatics, Philips decided to focus on the cloud for radiology, “To liberate diagnostic radiology from on premise to being accessible from anywhere so you can read, report and collaborate from anywhere. This really allows us to deepen our clinical collaboration between the radiologists and clinicians.”

Sebastian said the cloud helps “unburden the health systems from all for the work they have to do to manage and maintain their IT systems by themselves.” This helps eliminate capital spikes, the time and cost associated with upgrades and tech refreshes. “It now can all be done ubiquitously in the cloud.”

Philips currently operates in more than 1,000 sites around the world and manages and maintains more than 60 billion images, “so we know what it means to operate at scale in the cloud,” Sebastian said.

“What we are really focused on is how do we take the efficiencies from the cloud into the product? How does the product become a much simpler solution for radiologists to use?”

Scalability, Security and Accessibility

Sharing large datasets over the cloud without compromising quality is a complex task and Philips HealthSuite Imaging can help simplify that task.

Matthieu Ferrant, Product Management Leader, Philips Radiology Informatics, said that Philips’ experience with scaling systems and ensuring uptime quality of service helps ease the complexity. “What we are doing is leveraging the power of AWS to scale, and to make sure that the accessibility of that powerful network is also brought to our end customers and to make sure that this high availability is truly serving the customers.

“We also ensure that everything is duplicated, so [the users] never have a reason to be concerned. If one link goes down, you get another link — that’s the power of AWS linking that we enable through Philips HealthSuite Imaging.”

According to Ferrant, even when there may be connectivity issues due to a rural location or network availability, “we always have business continuity options to ensure we alleviate any variability in the network connectivity that a customer might have.”

“We have a very vast experience of scaling and ensuring that you have operational uptime and effective clinical care at all times when we are operating out of the cloud.”

Philips also has a great deal of experience helping customers transition to new systems, Ferrant said. “Upgrading [users] is something that is in our DNA. Transferring to the cloud is something that comes very naturally to us with the expertise that we have built. Thanks to our partnership with AWS, we can actually do that at scale and ensure that we can transition customers at a much faster pace than we have ever done before … and that pace is going to [continue] to accelerate.”

Ferrant said Philips provides a specific path to the cloud for its Vue PACS and IS Radiology PACS customers. “We do have dedicated paths that allow customers to take advantage of the fast, transparent and seamless transition from their current system to our HealthSuite Imaging offering in the cloud. We know our customers well. We know their workflows. We are going to make sure that their transition to HealthSuite Imaging in the cloud is seamless and will ensure continued clinical care without any disruption.”

Removing the Burden

The Philips and Amazon Web Services partnership helps improve processing speed, stability, security and mobility, while helping clinician and referring physicians leverage new machine learning and AI capabilities.

“For Philips, it is about deepening the workflows and deepening the collaboration that clinicians can do, unlocking AI and simplifying,” Madhuri said. “If we can orchestrate the efficiencies, that’s when we can really unburden the health systems from all of the headaches they have today managing [their] systems and then improve the quality of care while lowering their total cost of ownership.”

For more information on Philips HealthSuite Imaging and its capabilities, please visit usa.philips.com/healthcare/campaign/cloud-healthsuite-imaging.