What Infusing Artificial Intelligence With Health Care Could Mean

GE and Partners HealthCare are looking to revolutionize the way doctors treat patients by adding the manufacturing giant's artificial intelligence expertise to a partnership with the nonprofit hospital and physicians network over the next decade. The goal is to transform the notoriously slow-to-innovate health care industry by better analyzing the mountains of data doctors juggle in the hopes of coming up with better treatment methods and clearer diagnoses for the patients of the not-so-distant future. "We have more and more information, and the information comes at our clinicians in a way that can be unmanageable," said David Torchiana, CEO of Partners HealthCare. "In the end, this is about making health care better and making the lives of our patients better." GE and Partners, which owns Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women's Hospital, will spend the next 10 years creating artificial intelligence software that can detect how severe a stroke is and identify tumors in medical images. But more important than individual uses, officials said, will be an app store for health care AI algorithms, where hospitals can buy or sell software they've made.