The companies created the program for the development of startups focused on Digital Health, for the development of tools based on Artificial Intelligence.
The U.S. company General Electric, through its subsidiary focused on health, GE Healthcare and an accelerator of emerging companies of British origin, launched a program to support startups of Digital Health focused on developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies for health care and thus introduce new options to the health market.
The Edison Accelerator is a regional program to support the application of AI for healthcare. Currently, they will assist an initial group of six startups, which develop AI for medical imaging specialized in oncology, with the intention of improving the patient experience. The startups involved will focus on three key aspects, innovation, adoption, and integration. If successful, they will have access to GE Healthcare's Edison platform, which is an application design, development, and implementation tool.
“The healthcare industry produces substantial amounts of data, and it is extremely difficult to bring this data together, convert it into meaningful insights and bring those insights to the point of care. The opportunities for healthcare with a truly intelligent connected digital enterprise are significant, but no one organisation can get there alone,” said GE Healthcare's president and CEO for Europe, Middle East, and Africa, Catherine Estrampes. In addition, she mentioned that the future of medical innovation will lie in the ways in which the entire healthcare ecosystem, including emerging companies, research centers, hospitals, and medical staff, works and collaborates.
The application process began in January and is aimed at emerging companies in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa focusing on the promotion and use of big data, analytics, image processing, machine learning, and other variants of AI. Two programs belonging to the same initiative have achieved successful results in China and India, and now seek to replicate the results in Europe and other regions of Asia.
