Assessing the Potential Impact in Radiology for GE HealthCare’s Acquisition of Intelerad

Noting longstanding challenges with interoperability in radiology and health care at large, Roland Rott said the brunt of navigating between different software, different vendors and different systems has largely fallen upon the end user clinicians, who are already grappling with staff shortages and burnout.

“We believe — especially as a bigger player in the industry — we have a job to do to be a better integrator for our customers, and this is also one aspect of what makes our recent acquisition very interesting,” noted Rott, the president and CEO of imaging for GE HealthCare, in a recent interview with Diagnostic Imaging at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) conference.

Of course, the acquisition Rott mentioned is the recently announced plan by GE HealthCare to acquire Intelerad for $2.3 billion. Rott said the acquisition represents an opportunity to combine GE HealthCare’s know-how in artificial intelligence (AI) with Intelerad’s cloud-based platforms for managing radiology workflows.

“We are actually leading the industry today with more than 100 medical devices, which are FDA-cleared with embedded AI. But a lot of that AI sits in our system. So it's embedded AI whereas what Intelerad is offering is a cloud-based solution which can reach out to users … for example, with (data) sharing solutions or with workflow orchestration,” noted Rott.

(Editor’s note: For additional coverage of the RSNA conference, click here.)

The potential synergies with the acquisition may go a long way toward improving interoperability and efficiency in radiology with an expanded reach into different care settings, according to Rott.

“(At) GE HealthCare, we've been very much inpatient focused … whereas Intelerad has had a strong focus on cloud-based SaaS (software as a service)-based solutions in the space of outpatient imaging, of sharing data (and) providing teleradiology solutions. Once this acquisition is approved, then we can create solutions which are much more integrated along this entire care pathway and journey,” emphasized Rott.

(Editor’s note: For related content, see “Emerging Directions with Advances in Enterprise Imaging in Radiology,” “New Imaging Platform Allows Single-Integration Access to Multiple AI Vendors” and “Current Insights on Interoperability, Enterprise Imaging and AI Integration in Radiology.”)

For more insights from Roland Rott, watch the video below.