Health technology company Royal Philips has expanded its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Under the agreement, Philips' integrated diagnostics portfolio in the cloud will be expanded including radiology, digital pathology, cardiology, and AI-advanced visualized solutions.
The two companies have an existing relationship, with Philips already migrating 150 sites across North America and Latin America to AWS. The expanded agreement will also see customer cloud migrations in Europe.
“The collaboration between Philips and AWS gives healthcare providers scalable, secure-by-design cloud-enabled solutions to accelerate healthcare innovation,” said Matt Garman, CEO of AWS.
“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.”
Under the partnership, Philips will create generative AI applications using foundation models from Amazon Bedrock that it hopes can be used to reduce administrative and routine tasks. One of the ways this could be implemented is through "conversational reporting" which will create structured reports out of conversational language between clinicians and patients.
“Philips’ cloud-based healthcare informatics solutions allow us to drive better outcomes across clinical disciplines, including radiology, digital pathology, and cardiology. We’re working closely with clinicians to ensure workflows become more efficient and give back valuable time to healthcare providers,” said Roy Jakobs, CEO of Royal Philips. “Collaborating with AWS helps us to innovate faster and deliver better care for more people.”
In March 2024, Philips and AWS teamed up to make digitalized pathology slides available at scale in the cloud. This was designed to help pathology labs store and analyze large volumes of data more effectively, with the eventual impact hoped to reduce clinician burnout.
AWS signed a similar agreement with GE Healthcare in July of this year, which will see GE HealthCare using AWS as its strategic cloud provider, and using its healthcare and generative AI services to "build and implement new, versatile foundation models to transform the future of healthcare."
Like many other sectors, healthcare is increasingly looking to the cloud for its IT provision. In Australia, Macquarie Cloud Services and VITG began offering a sovereign cloud for Australia's healthcare industry in September 2023.
Earlier this year, the UK's NHS officially decommissioned its data centers following a migration to the cloud for its NHS Spine system. The cloud provider used was not shared.
