UW Madison Streamlines Protocol Management with GE Healthcare on AWS

To make sure that the right exam is delivered for each patient, medical providers must engage in protocoling, the process of assigning scanning parameters to imaging orders. Maintaining protocols is an ongoing activity that aims to decrease scan variability, minimize scan interruptions, and deliver the lowest radiation dose (for computed tomography scans). 

Keeping up with protocol changes can be difficult. Updating protocols is typically a manual process that often involves travel to each scanner’s location. These updates can involve changing thousands of protocol parameters. 

With goals to simplify protocol management and optimize patient care, medical device manufacturer GE Healthcare and the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW Madison) created a partnership and began working on a solution.

The result of this collaboration was GE Healthcare’s Imaging Protocol Manager, a cloud-native tool that helps standardize protocols for scanners remotely. Built using Amazon Web Services (AWS), GE Healthcare delivers this product to UW Madison’s hospital network as well as its global customer base. “Using our Imaging Protocol Manager, our customers can now . . . download protocols to imaging devices across the organization with one click,” says Yaxi Shen, senior product director at GE Healthcare. Medical providers are also able to upload, edit, and monitor protocols remotely using the cloud-native application. 

GE Healthcare relies on several AWS services to power its Imaging Protocol Manager solution. For example, it uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud, to support remote protocol updates. GE Healthcare also uses Amazon Cognito—which facilitates user sign-up, sign-in, and access control to web and mobile applications—to prevent unauthorized users from accessing the application.

Using Imaging Protocol Manager, UW Madison’s hospital employees no longer need to travel and physically configure scanners to remain consistent across their fleet. Instead, they can update their fleet remotely from one location. Imaging Protocol Manager has strengthened UW Madison’s ability to provide personalized, high-quality imaging services. “Protocols define the differences in image quality and in many cases will be the helping or limiting factor in your radiologist making the right diagnosis,” says Timothy Szczykutowicz, associate professor of radiology at UW Madison. “The cloud-based protocol manager solution lets us disseminate these good practices . . . to all the sites within our region or globally. We do all this to get the best picture we can for our patients and to have optimized, patient-specific care.” 

By building Imaging Protocol Manager on AWS, GE Healthcare has helped significantly reduce the need for hospital networks to perform manual device updates, reducing costs, time, and labor. The solution can scale on demand to serve small practices and large, multifacility networks. “On AWS . . . we can scale our application up or down based on customer demand, such as the number of devices in an imaging fleet, number of users, and resource usage,” says Shen.  

On AWS, GE Healthcare is empowering its customers to seamlessly standardize their imaging protocols, delivering consistent image quality and optimal patient care. “Through strong support from AWS, our solution is aimed to help clinicians deliver consistent, high-quality imaging services to their organizations for every patient, everywhere, every time,” says Shen.

Visit Medical Imaging on AWS or thinkwithwp.com/health for more information.