GE HealthCare (Nasdaq:GEHC) announced today that it appointed Dr. Taha Kass-Hout as its first chief technology officer.
Kass-Hout’s responsibilities include leading the GE spinoff’s new science and technology organization. He reports to GE HealthCare President and CEO Peter Arduini.
According to a news release, the role includes driving the company’s D3 precision care strategy. This framework emphasizes GE HealthCare’s smart devices. D3 brings data and insights together with the aim of optimizing the clinical and patient journey. This enhances the company’s ability to enable precision care, it said.
“GE HealthCare has a strong track record of industry-first technologies and an innovation pipeline of products focused on improving patient care,” said Arduini. “As a cardiologist, digital and ML expert, Taha has exceptional clinical and technology experience. Under his leadership, our new science and research organization will drive greater end-to-end alignment within our key research and product development segments to deliver innovative solutions that transform the future of healthcare and enhance our ability to enable precision care.”
About Dr. Taha Kass-Hout
Before joining GE HealthCare, Kass-Hout served as VP, machine learning and CMO at Amazon and Amazon Web Services. His role there included establishing and leading health AI strategy and technologies.
“The future is bright for anyone who’s trying to solve problems in healthcare and life science globally,” he said during an interview in early 2022 with MassDevice‘s sister Medical Design & Outsourcing site.
Additionally, Kass-Hout served two terms in the Obama Administration in leadership roles at the FDA. He became the FDA’s first chief health informatics officer. Kass-Hout also served as director, information science and informatics for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“As a clinician, public servant, and digital heath and ML expert, I am honored to join the GE HealthCare team, whose passion, purpose and commitment to lead the digital transformation and improve outcomes for patients and providers clearly aligns with mine,” said Kass-Hout. “I am excited about what lies ahead and the incredible opportunity to deliver on GE HealthCare’s purpose of creating a world where healthcare has no limits and establishing a new frontier in advancing diagnostics and personalized therapeutics to people.”
About the CTO position at GE HealthCare
Kass-Hout’s new role includes working in partnership with GE HealthCare’s four business segments. The business segments are imaging, ultrasound, patient care solutions and pharmaceutical diagnostics. The company also expects him to work in partnership with different regions and engineering and machine learning teams.
GE HealthCare said its new science and technology organization works to execute its goal of advancing the future of healthcare. That includes delivering personalized care across the patient journey. The company said its team features researchers innovating for the healthcare ecosystem.
It also seeks to execute on digital strategies from software development to device integration and cloud adoption. Its region research teams help connect and execute its external engagement strategy, GE HealthCare said.
“One of the biggest dilemmas our customers face is delivering personalized care the right way, getting the right diagnosis with the right data,” said Arduini. “With our D3 precision care framework, GE HealthCare is uniquely positioned to help our customers leverage data across health care systems, to solve diagnosis challenges and develop personalized approaches for better patient outcomes, while increasing productivity.”
In case you missed the spinoff news
The spinoff of GE’s healthcare business became official yesterday, Jan. 4, 2023. The company began trading on the Nasdaq market and joined the S&P 500.
GE announced its plans to spin off its medtech business in November 2021. Its board signed off on the deal in November 2022. GE made a pro rata distribution of approximately 80.1% of the outstanding GE HealthCare shares to GE shareholders. It retained approximately 19.9% of the outstanding shares of GE HealthCare’s common stock.
Chicago-based GE HealthCare is No. 6 in our sister site Medical Design & Outsourcing‘s Big 100 ranking of the world’s largest medical device companies. It brings in about $18 billion a year in annual revenue. The company also registers more than $1 billion a year in R&D spending, and has 51,000 employees.
Shares of GEHC rose 0.9% to $61 apiece in mid-morning trading today. MassDevice’s MedTech 100 Index — which includes stocks of the world’s largest medical device companies — was up 7.4%.
“As an independent company, we have a unique opportunity in front of us to deliver on the future of healthcare,” GE HealthCare’s CEO Peter Arduini said in a LinkedIn post yesterday.
“We have unmatched scope and scale with a leadership position in attractive growth markets. By leveraging more than a century of innovation, we are ready to bring a new level of focus and agility to how we deliver care across the patient journey.”