The GE Brief: January 22, 2021
The coronavirus has sped the adoption of artificial intelligence and other digital technologies in healthcare: AI, for instance, has aided doctors with tasks ranging from speedier CT and MRI scans to the positioning of breathing tubes in patients suffering from respiratory distress. But as top healthcare experts from across the country explained last week in a Washington Post Live webinar, that’s just scratching the surface of what AI has to offer. “AI is making health systems more intelligent, it’s helping in patient care and it’s lowering overall costs,” said Everett Cunningham, GE Healthcare’s CEO of the U.S. and Canada. (GE sponsored the event.) “To me, that’s the trifecta. AI is here to stay.”
Ready for what’s next: One compelling example is drug development. SARS, MERS and now COVID-19 have given researchers a greater understanding of the genomic spectrum of coronaviruses, as one panelist, Exscientia founder and CEO Andrew Hopkins, pointed out. That understanding, coupled with the use of AI in genome mapping, could help them discover a “pan-virus compound” more quickly in the event of a future pandemic. AI can help on the scale of the molecule and the test tube, but it can also help on the scale of the whole hospital — even the whole hospital network. As Cunningham explained, hospitals in the U.S. today are using AI-assisted software from GE Healthcare that pulls data from multiple systems and devices to help clinicians see in real time and in a comprehensive way how their patients are doing. The technology helps them better serve patients, and it also helps hospital staff free up beds and cut the length of the average patient stay.
Click here for more takeaways from last week’s panel.
OUT OF THIS WORLD
In the summer of 2019, a rocket arced across the skies above the Mojave Desert — but it didn’t launch from the ground. Rather, it had been dropped from beneath the wing of a modified Boeing 747-400, which was nicknamed Cosmic Girl and powered by four GE CF6 jet engines. That endeavor was called a drop test; by design, the rocket fell back to the earth. Last Sunday, the rocket, called LauncheOne, fired again and propelled itself to 17,000 miles an hour and just kept going, reaching orbit for the first time. The achievement was a significant milestone in an effort by Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit to launch rockets from beneath the wings of airplanes rather than from the ground, with the goal of putting satellites into space more cheaply and accessibly.
Rocket plan: In 2018, Cosmic Girl’s chief pilot, Kelly Latimer, told GE Reports, “We hope to open access to space for companies or organizations who want to put small satellites into orbit by making launch affordable and flexible.” Sunday’s payload included satellites designed and assembled by high school and college students in conjunction with NASA’s Educational Launch of Nanosatellites initiative. Virgin Orbit provided live updates of the launch on its Twitter account. A tweet at 2:49 p.m., when the vehicle achieved orbit, read, “Everybody on the team who is not in mission control right now is going absolutely bonkers.”
Read more here.
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“Collaboration is key. It’s going to take the entire ecosystem of healthcare to really tackle this and move healthcare forward.”
— Everett Cunningham, president and CEO of the U.S. and Canada for GE Healthcare
Quote: GE Reports. Images: Getty Images, Virgin Orbit.