Philips and AWS Scale Digital Pathology with Improved Capabilities

Royal Philips has expanded its collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to address the growing need for secure digital pathology solutions in the cloud. This combines Philips’ leadership and expertise in the digitalization of pathology to optimize clinical workflows with AWS’ leadership in secure cloud solutions. 
 
Philips and AWS will advance pathology, by helping pathology labs to efficiently store, analyze, and manage digital pathology data, enabling more labs to adopt digital workflows to increase productivity. Pathology labs will also be able to optimize workflow efficiency, facilitate collaboration, and provide a seamless integration with existing healthcare systems for holistic patient care. 
 
Pathology plays a crucial role in diagnosing and managing a variety of diseases, including cancer. An estimated 70% of important medical decisions are made through laboratory or pathology tests [1]. Expanded capabilities are called for to meet the growing needs of data volumes and computing resources to power innovative AI models.  
 
“By harnessing the power of the cloud to accelerate the digitization of pathology, we are improving the quality of patient care by enabling greater workflow efficiency and collaboration at scale,” said Shez Partovi, Chief Innovation & Strategy Officer and Chief Business Leader Enterprise Informatics at Philips. “As the demand for pathology-based diagnosis continues to increase, we see digital pathology in the cloud as a critical enabler for productivity, scale and to further transform healthcare diagnostics by opening new avenues for research, education, and the integration of AI to further improve patient care.”
 
Philips has more than 300 customers that use its Philips IntelliSite Pathology, a fully integrated digital workflow. The collaboration with AWS has the potential to enable large-scale clinical trials, and multi-institutional studies to address complex cases. 
 
AWS HealthImaging will be used to optimize storage, increase scale, and enable AI and research within the healthcare system to simplify workflows and advance pathology image analysis. Amazon Bedrock will support generative AI application integration and development.
 
“Healthcare organizations benefit when clinical workflow leadership is combined with scalable cloud infrastructure. By building their cloud-native enterprise pathology solution on services like AWS HealthImaging and Amazon Bedrock, Philips is offering their customers the best of both worlds,” said Tehsin Syed, GM of Health AI at AWS. “Secure cloud-based offerings address the growing demand to store and utilize more data, and by digitizing pathology healthcare leaders can apply AI and ML to drive better insights. We look forward to continued work with Philips to help improve productivity, advance research, and ultimately enable more precise and tailored patient care.”  
 
Philips and AWS will be able to support radiologists, offering an integrated diagnostic approach to empower clinicians with improved diagnostic workflows and quicker access to images from any location.
 
Resources:
[1] Report of the Second Phase of the Review of NHS Pathology Services in England, Lord Carter of Coles (2008). Results are specific to the institution where they were obtained and may not reflect the results achievable at other institutions.