Q&A: GE HealthCare spotlights digital innovations at HIMSS25

Las Vegas – At HIMSS Global Conference & Exhibition, Peter Eggleston, global product marketing director at GE HealthCare, sat down with MobiHealthNews to discuss the company’s recent digital offerings for healthcare.

MobiHealthNews: What innovations is GE HealthCare showcasing at HIMSS25?

Peter Eggleston: One of the biggest announcements we have this year is a new brand called Genesis, and the value proposition for the customers behind Genesis is to be able to bring them innovation faster, more reliably and at a lower cost through cloud-first and cloud-hybrid technologies.

What I mean by that is that traditionally, with on-prem software [on-premises], it is very hard to keep those systems updated.  There is a lot of cost, not just the software itself, but the IT overhead and infrastructure, et cetera. That’s why the cloud has all these great talking points.

But what if you have made a heavy investment in on-prem? Do you need to throw all of that away to the cloud? If you move to the cloud do you lose the benefits of on-prem? 

So, with Genesis, we’re taking a cloud-first and cloud-hybrid approach that says, “You know what? On-prem has benefits, cloud has benefits and we are going to marry the best of both,” kind of like a hybrid EV. A lot of people are hesitant to go all-cloud or hesitant to buy an all-electric vehicle. They want to hedge their bets a little bit. That’s what Genesis does. It allows them to adopt innovation much more quickly via cloud-based technologies, much more affordably because we offer software-as-a-service, and it allows them to still maintain the investments in the on-prem infrastructures but augment them. 

So, I’ll give you an example. So, for our enterprise archive customers, this uses a lot of storage and images are huge and they are getting bigger.  Let’s say I’ve got an archive, and I need to provision more storage. Do I provision that on-premise, or maybe I put my new storage in the cloud.

So, Genesis storage as a solution allows our enterprise archive customers three options. They can start to augment their on-prem storage with the cloud, or they can totally replace the on-prem storage, keep the archive control on-prem, but put the storage in the cloud, or they can just simply put a second or third copy in the cloud. 

The next step is let’s move some of the archiving functionality up to the cloud, the control and command of that data; that’s what our Genesis VNA does. It allows them to have all the benefits of a vendor-neutral archive in the cloud, but it gets it as a software-as-a-service. 

There’s another advantage there in that we actually take a hybrid approach and put us a small edge server with six months worth of data on-prem. So, if a hurricane comes through and you lose your connection to the cloud, you still have some business continuity. You can still get the images that the clinicians are going to need to continue to care.

That can be used with any clinical viewer the operation has on-prem or we can provide a zero footprint viewer for them to use that can be used for diagnosis or clinicians. But we also maintain that edge server as a service. So, we have over 150 monitoring data points of the infrastructure. We have over 170 monitoring points of the software. We’re constantly monitoring, upgrading and maturing the reliability of that edge device.

The other thing that edge device does, besides business continuity, is to provide a single, secure point of connection to the cloud. So, if you’re an organization and you’ve got lots of different scanners, you don’t want to connect each one of them to the cloud. 

So you can connect through these edge devices. It’s highly secured. It is highly optimized in terms of the compression up and down to the cloud. And, again, it’s monitored. So that is what is out with Genesis now.

MHN: What is next for the company?

Eggleston: What we’re doing with our next-generation viewer, that is coming out later this year, is we will be providing a brand new diagnostic viewer that is totally cloud-based and that will be part of the Genesis Solution Suite as well.