Las Vegas – in HIMSS Global Conference & Exhibition of Peter Eggleston, Global Product Marketing Director at GE Healthcare, sat down with MobihealthNews to discuss recent digital products for healthcare.
MobiHealthNews: What innovations does GE Healthcare showcase at HIMSS25?
Peter Eggleston: One of the biggest announcements of the year is a new brand called Genesis, and the customer value proposition behind Genesis is that it can bring innovation faster, more reliably, at a lower cost, through cloud-first and cloud hybrid technologies.
What I mean is traditionally, updating these systems using on-plame software (ontremis). There are many costs, not just the software itself, but also IT overhead and infrastructure. That's why we have all these great story points in the cloud.
But what happens if you invest a lot in OnPrem? Should I throw all of that into the cloud? Will on-prem benefits be lost when you move to the cloud?
Therefore, Genesis takes a cloud-first and cloud-hybrid approach: “Do you know? On-prem has advantages, advantages, and I intend to marry both the best.” Many people are hesitant to go to all the clouds. They want to hedge a bit of bets. That is Genesis. This allows for faster innovation to be adopted through cloud-based technology. This is much more affordable because it offers software as a service, allowing you to maintain investments in on-plain infrastructure, but strengthens them.
So I'll give you an example. So for enterprise archive customers, this uses a lot of storage, the images are huge and larger. Let's say you have an archive. And you need to provide more storage. Do you offer that on-premises or put new storage in the cloud.
Therefore, Genesis Storage as a solution enables enterprise archive customers to have three options: You can start expanding your on-plame storage in the cloud, replace on-plame storage entirely, keep archive control on-plame, but you can also place storage in the cloud, or place a second or third copy in the cloud.
The next step is to move some of the archive features to the cloud, control and commands for that data. That's what our Genesis VNA does. All the advantages of vendor neutral archives in the cloud can have, but you get them as software as a service.
Another advantage is that we actually take a hybrid approach and place six months of data on a small edge server in ONPREM. So, even if hurricanes come in and the cloud is losing connection, there is business continuity. You will still be able to obtain the images that clinicians need to continue their care.
This can be used in clinical viewers. Surgery has on-plame. Alternatively, you can use a Zero Footprint Viewer, which can be used for diagnostic or clinicians. However, its Edge server is also maintained as a service. Therefore, there are over 150 monitoring data points in the infrastructure. There are over 170 monitoring points for the software. We constantly monitor, upgrade and mature the reliability of our edge devices.
Another thing Edge devices do is to provide a single secure connection point to the cloud, in addition to business continuity. So, if you're an organization and have a lot of different scanners, you don't want to connect each of those scanners to the cloud.
Therefore, you can connect through these edge devices. It's very safe. It is highly optimized in terms of compression to the cloud. And once again, it is being monitored. So that's what appears in Genesis now.
MHN: What's next for the company?
Eggleston: What we're doing with the next generation of viewers announced later this year is to provide a new diagnostic viewer that is completely cloud-based and will become part of the Genesis Solution Suite.
