Attendees walk through the exhibit hall at the AWS re:Invent conference hosted by Amazon Web Services at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas on November 28, 2023.
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Amazon Web Services and venture capital firm General Catalyst announced a new multi-year partnership on Monday, their latest effort to tap into the growing market for artificial intelligence in healthcare.
Through this partnership, General Catalyst portfolio companies will use AWS services to build and launch artificial intelligence tools for healthcare systems faster. Aidoc, which applies artificial intelligence to medical imaging, and Commure, which uses artificial intelligence to automate provider workflows, will be the first two companies to participate.
No financial terms were disclosed in the announcement.
“Without strong partners like Amazon and AWS working alongside them to develop and support these companies… it’s not going to move as fast as we hope,” said Chris Bischoff, head of global healthcare investments at General Catalyst. When interviewed by CNBC.
America’s health system is strained, its staff is exhausted, labor shortages are growing, and profits are razor-thin. These challenges may seem attractive to enterprising technology startups, especially as the multi-trillion-dollar health care industry faces the prospect of huge financial rewards.
Hospitals are a complex, technology-starved and highly regulated industry that makes it difficult for new companies to enter. General Catalyst hopes to help its company quickly track the development and launch process by leveraging AWS’s computing power and other resources.
General Catalyst is no stranger to big initiatives in the healthcare space.
The company has closed more than 60 digital health deals since 2020, trailing only Gaingels and Alumni Ventures, according to a December report brochure. Last January, General Catalyst shocked the industry by announcing that its new business, the Health Assurance Transformation Company, planned to acquire an Ohio health system, an unprecedented move in the venture capital world.
Dan Sheeran, general manager of healthcare and life sciences at AWS, told CNBC that General Catalyst’s “deep understanding” of the financial and operational realities of healthcare systems makes it an attractive partner for AWS. After meeting in London about nine months ago, Sheeran and Bischoff began outlining a collaboration between the two teams.
AWS also has a strong presence in healthcare. The company offers more health and life sciences-specific services than any other cloud provider and has other high-profile artificial intelligence partnerships, according to a press release GE Healthcare, Philips and others from last year.
The partnership between General Catalyst and AWS will last several years, but new tools from Aidoc and Commure will be available in 2025. Patterns, with implementation examples.
Aidoc and Commure were selected to launch the collaboration because they have both established product-market fit, operability, and focus on AWS customer priorities.
“GC spent a lot of time thinking about how the health system can transform itself, and we recognized that it wasn’t going to happen through 1,000 companies, we needed truly enterprise-level solutions,” Bischoff said. “Amazon shares the same vision, so we started with These two start.”
Although the partnership between General Catalyst and AWS is still in its early stages, the two organizations said they believe it will help meet growing market demand for new solutions.
“Health system leaders who want to realize the benefits of artificial intelligence now have an easier way to do so,” Sheeran said.
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