Amazon and General Catalyst Join Forces to Accelerate AI-Driven Healthcare Innovation

Amazon and General Catalyst Launch AI-Focused Health Partnership | PYMNTS.com

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has formed an artificial intelligence (AI)-centric health partnership with General Catalyst. AWS says the collaboration, announced Monday (Jan. 13), combines its tech expertise with General Catalyst's history of healthcare investments. "AWS and General Catalyst believe that AI has immense potential to [effect] meaningful change in global health care," AWS CEO Matt Garman said in a news release. "Together, we are taking bold steps to improve patient outcomes and make quality care more accessible to all by embedding AI throughout the care journey." According to the release, the partnership will focus on building and deploying AI-powered solutions to address crucial needs in predictive and personalized care, interoperability, operational and clinical efficiency, diagnostics and patient engagement. The potential here is "vast," the companies said, with plans to employ the power of generative AI using Amazon Bedrock and team with providers like Anthropic and Mistral AI as well as securely trained health care-specific models. "One example is the ability to drive more personalized health care by using disease-specific models that process diverse health data -- such as radiology and pathology scans, genomic sequencing information, clinical trial data, and electronic health records -- to help doctors and researchers identify patterns and diagnose, make predictions about treatment outcomes, offer insights into disease progression, and more," the release said. Writing Monday about the intersection between generative AI (GenAI) and healthcare, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster posited a world in which "your doctor knows you're getting sick before you do" and healthcare is more of a "proactive partnership" than a thing to worry about. "GenAI has the potential to shift the conversation -- and time and dollars spent -- from how much it costs to make people well when they get sick to preventing illness before it even begins," Webster wrote. "That will make the future of healthcare about using GenAI to better understand and prevent disease. Interactions with the patient will become patient-first and smart-technology driven." The economics, that report adds, are "compelling," as U.S. healthcare costs -- which came to nearly $5 trillion in 2023 -- are projected to reach $7.7 trillion by 2032. Many consumers, especially younger ones, say they'll skip or delay medical care because they can't afford it. "That's not just expensive -- it's unsustainable," Webster wrote. "By using intelligent monitoring devices and personalized health insights, it's possible to dramatically reduce the cost of chronic disease management. Medication can be remotely prescribed, administered and monitored as appropriate, staving off a full-blown, expensive and potentially physically debilitating medical crisis."

AWS and General Catalyst partner to speed up development of health-care AI tools

Through the collaboration, General Catalyst portfolio companies will use AWS' services to build and roll out AI tools for health systems more quickly. Aidoc, which applies AI to medical imaging, and Commure, which automates provider workflows with AI, will be the first two companies to participate. No financial terms were disclosed in the announcement. "Without a strong partner like Amazon and AWS to stand alongside them, to co-develop and support these companies ... it's not going to move as fast as we hope," Chris Bischoff, head of global health-care investing at General Catalyst, told CNBC in an interview. Health systems are strained in the U.S., with staff burnout, growing labor shortages and razor-thin margins. These challenges often seem enticing for enterprising tech startups to tackle, especially as the multi-trillion dollar health-care industry dangles the prospect of large financial returns. Hospitals operate in a complex, technology-weary and highly-regulated sector that can be difficult for startups to break into. General Catalyst is hoping to help its companies fast-track the development and go-to-market process by leveraging resources like computing power from AWS.