Philips and AWS collaborate to scale digital pathology in the cloud, enhancing diagnostic capabilities and improving productivity

Mar 12, 2024 | 3 minute read

Philips and AWS will advance digital pathology and help pathology labs to efficiently store, manage, and analyze growing volumes of digital pathology data and enable more pathology labs to adopt digital workflows to increase productivity. In addition, pathology labs will be able to optimize workflow efficiency and facilitate collaboration among specialists, enabling seamless integration with existing healthcare systems to deliver holistic patient care.

Through examination of patient tissue samples, pathology plays a crucial role in the diagnosis and management of a variety of diseases, particularly cancer. With an estimated 70% of important medical decisions involving laboratory or pathology tests [1], the availability of digitally stored pathology images is especially important as it has a significant impact on patient care. The growing need for scalable storage to meet new data volumes and computing resources to power innovative artificial intelligence (AI) models, calls for expanding capabilities of traditional on-premise solutions into the cloud.

“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 is an industry-leading provider of digital pathology solutions, with more than 300 customers using the fully digital workflow of Philips IntelliSite Pathology. Philips’ collaboration with AWS has the potential to enable large scale clinical trials, multi-institute studies, and care collaboration to address complex cases, including in cancer care. Philips will use AWS HealthImaging to optimize storage, increase scale and enable AI and research across the healthcare system to advance pathology image analysis and simplify clinical workflows. Additionally, Amazon Bedrock, which offers high-performing foundation models (FMs), will support generative AI application development and integration.

“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.” 

Combined with Philips HealthSuite Imaging on AWS to support radiologists, Philips’ broad capabilities in enterprise informatics enable an integrated diagnostics approach to empower clinicians with improved diagnostic workflows, quicker access to images from any location – helping along the entire workflow across enterprise imaging, from diagnosis to treatment options and follow-up.

For more information on Philips’ informatics solutions and news at HIMSS, please visit here or join us in person at the HIMSS 2024 conference, booth #2041 and follow #HIMSS24 for updates.