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GE HealthCare appoints former Amazon exec as first chief technology officer

New GE HealthCare CTO Dr. Taha Kass-Hout served as chief medical officer and director of machine learning at Amazon Web Services [Photo courtesy of Amazon]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…

CVS Health to buy Signify Health for $8B

CVS Health (NYSE:CVS) announced that it entered into an agreement to acquire Signify Health for approximately $8 billion.

Home healthcare services company Signify Health offers clinical, social, and behavioral services to support value-based healthcare. It provides a mobile network of 10,000 credentialed clinicians who offer in-home evaluations of Medicare Advantage and Medicaid plan members.

CVS said in a news release that Signify Health’s clinicians and providers will engage with CVS Health’s collection of assets, connecting patients to care how and when they need it.

“Signify Health will play a critical role in advancing our health care services strategy and gives us a platform to accelerate our growth in value-based care,” said CVS Health President and CEO, Karen S. Lynch. “This acquisition will enhance our connection to consumers in the home and enables providers to better address patient needs as we execute our vision …

Amazon is reportedly shutting down Amazon Care

Multiple reports citing an internal memo at Amazon (Nasdaq:AMZN) say that the company will stop offering its Amazon Care services at the end of 2022.

Geekwire reported that Neil Lindsay, Amazon Health Services SVP, issued an internal memo declaring that the Amazon Care primary healthcare services “wasn’t going to work long-term.”

According to the report, Amazon has said that the decision to no longer offer the primary healthcare services after Dec. 31, 2022, only affects Amazon Care and none of the other healthcare ventures made by the company, which include a potential multi-billion-dollar acquisition of home healthcare services company Signify Health. The company also announced a nearly $4 billion deal to acquire One Medical last month.

Lindsay wrote in the memo that the company determined that Care “isn’t the right long-term solution for our enterprise customers.”

“This decision wasn’t made lightly and only b…

What’s Amazon planning for primary care provider One Medical?

Amazon Diagnostics’ COVID-19 testing lab in Hebron, Kentucky[Image courtesy of Amazon]

Amazon’s anti-friction focus will find many opportunities in healthcare.

Here we go again.

That was my first thought when reading the news that Seattle-based Amazon (Nasdaq:AMZN) plans to buy One Medical for nearly $4 billion.

The deal immediately brought to mind Amazon’s $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods, which to this day remains Amazon’s largest purchase. The retail business is a different industry than healthcare, but there are plenty of similarities that the medical device and pharmaceutical industries ought to consider.

For one, Amazon’s retail efforts have always focused on customer convenience, from the early days of online book buying to the patented one-click “buy now” button and fee-generating Prime memberships, which topped 200 million subscribers last y…

Amazon seeks healthcare ‘reinvention’ with $4B One Medical acquisition

Amazon (Nasdaq:AMZN) is making a big expansion into healthcare, with plans to acquire primary care provider One Medical in a nearly $4 billion deal.

One Medical is a healthcare organization with a focus on digital health and inviting, convenient in-office primary care. According to its website, it has locations in 17 metro areas across the country: Atlanta; Austin, Texas; Boston; Chicago; Columbus, Ohio; Dallas-Fort Worth; Houston; Los Angeles; New York; Orange County, California; Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina; San Diego, Seattle, and San Francisco. Additional locations are coming soon to Miami and Milwaukee.

RELATED: What’s Amazon planning for One Medical?

“We think health care is high on the list of experiences that need reinvention. Booking an appointment, waiting weeks or even months to be seen, taking time off work, driving to a clinic, finding a parking spot, waiting in the waiting room then the exam room for what is too often a rushed few m…

Amazon partners with Fred Hutchinson Cancer on cancer vaccine trial

Amazon (Nasdaq:AMZN) and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center are working together on a Phase 1 FDA-approved clinical study that will investigate a personalized neo-antigen peptide vaccine for melanoma and certain types of breast cancer.

According to a listing on clinicaltrials.gov, the study aims to recruit 20 participants.

Amazon will offer scientific and machine learning capabilities in the alliance with the Seattle-based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

In particular, the Phase 1 study will focus on patients with stage IIIC-IV melanoma or hormone-receptor-positive HER2 negative breast cancer. In addition, patients’ cancer in the trial must either be metastatic or refractory.

Patients in the study will receive a weekly intramuscular injection of poly ICLC in weeks when no vaccine is administered. Poly ICLC is an immunostimulant composed of polyinosinic-polycytidylic acid, carboxymethylcellulose and polylysine.

Two weeks afte…

The cloud is transforming medtech: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, J&J, Philips and GE Healthcare leaders explain

[Illustration via Adobe Stock] Leaders in medtech and cloud computing discuss payoffs and potential in device connectivity, product development and cross-industry partnerships.

If knowledge is power, that power comes from a steady stream of information, and we know there’s no shortage of that in healthcare.

The challenge has long been how to capture that information, store it, analyze it and deploy it to improve medical product design, manufacturing and the health of patients.

Then came the cloud, and with it a host of acronyms: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and — following the same convention — software as a medical device (SaMD).

Over the past few months, Medical Design & Outsourcing connected with leaders in medtech and cloud computing, including the three largest providers of cloud computing services: Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Google (Nasdaq: GOOGL).…

The cloud is transforming medtech: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, J&J, Philips and GE Healthcare leaders explain

[Illustration via Adobe Stock]

Leaders in medtech and cloud computing discuss payoffs and potential in device connectivity, product development and cross-industry partnerships.

If knowledge is power, that power comes from a steady stream of information, and we know there’s no shortage of that in healthcare.

The challenge has long been how to capture that information, store it, analyze it and deploy it to improve medical product design, manufacturing and the health of patients.

Then came the cloud, and with it a host of acronyms: software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and — following the same convention — software as a medical device (SaMD).

Over the past few months, Medical Design & Outsourcing connected with leaders in medtech and cloud computing, including the three largest providers of cloud computing services: Amazon (Nasda…

May 2022 Issue: The cloud is transforming medtech

The cloud is transforming medtech: Amazon, Microsoft, Google, J&J, Philips and GE Healthcare leaders explain

How DeepWell is developing video games as tools for treating medical conditions

Digital therapeutics open up new opportunities in medicine

Harnessing the power of cloud computing

When Johnson & Johnson and Microsoft announced a deal earlier this year to use cloud computing to support digital surgery, executives on both sides spoke with Medical Design & Outsourcing about how the partnership could advance medtech.

That started a series of conversations with leaders at cloud computing giants Google, Microsoft and Amazon — and on the device side at Johnson & Johnson, Philips and GE Healthcare. We consistently heard that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated cloud adoption not only for medical records and telehealth, but also for manufacturing operations, supply chain management and making new vaccines, therapies and d…

Amazon Web Services is powering medtech innovation: Its chief medical officer explains

It doesn’t get any bigger than Amazon in the world of cloud computing.

Dr. Taha Kass-Hout is the chief medical officer and director of machine learning at Amazon Web Services [Photo courtesy of Amazon]The Amazon Web Services cloud computing business at Seattle-based Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) is the largest player in the industry, with control of about a third of the market and a significant lead over cloud competitors Microsoft and Google.

Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, the chief medical officer and director of machine learning at AWS, spoke with Medical Design & Outsourcing as part of an ongoing series of conversations about cloud computing’s contributions to medtech and the potential ahead.

“The future is bright for anyone who’s trying to solve problems in healthcare and life science globally,” he said.

Get the full story at our sister site, Medical Design & Outsourcing.

An Amazon cloud conversation with AWS Chief Medical Officer Taha Kass-Hout

Taha Kass-Hout is the chief medical officer and director of machine learning at Amazon Web Services [Photo courtesy of Amazon]

It doesn’t get any bigger than Amazon in the world of cloud computing.

The Amazon Web Services cloud computing business at Seattle-based Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) is the largest player in the industry, with control of about a third of the market and a significant lead over cloud competitors Microsoft and Google.

Taha Kass-Hout, the chief medical officer and director of machine learning at AWS, spoke with Medical Design & Outsourcing as part of an ongoing series of conversations about cloud computing’s contributions to medtech and the potential ahead.

“The future is bright for anyone who’s trying to solve problems in healthcare and life science globally,” he said.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

MDO: What d…

Making biomedical data computable

Vik Nagjee is the vice president of product at nference [Photo courtesy of nference]

Cloud computing can power quantum leaps in human health.

Vik Nagjee, nference

A state-of-the art platform that supports real world evidence (RWE) and health economics and outcomes research can enable breakthroughs at an unprecedented scale.

This is achieved by making the de-identified, transformed information contained within the electronic medical record (EMR) available for data science and analysis at the aggregate and patient level. Add multi-modal data sources such as imaging and electrocardiograms as well as novel data assets like digital pathology and omics data to enrich the EMR data to provide a truly longitudinal view of the patient, and you have the beginnings of a world-class platform.

The keys are privacy preservation, harnessing longitudinal data, data enrichment and a data science platform.

P…