Taha Kass-Hout, M.D., M.S., has left his role as vice president, machine learning and chief medical officer at Amazon and Amazon Web Services to become chief technology officer at GE HealthCare (Nasdaq: GEHC), which recently spun out of its parent company.
While at Amazon, Kass-Hout established and led health AI strategy and technologies, including Amazon HealthLake, Amazon Comprehend Medical, and Amazon Omics, for healthcare, genomics, and life sciences industries. He also served two terms in the Obama Administration as the FDA’s first Chief Health Informatics Officer, and Director, Information Science and Informatics for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
He will now lead Chicago-based GE HealthCare’s new science and technology organization. The company said this new group, alongside the creation of the CTO role, demonstrates its commitment to driving innovation, growth, and value through research and development.
The GE Healthcare business, which spun out of the larger General Electric, produced operating profits of $2.8 billion on revenues of nearly $17.6 billion in 2021. About half of its sales are recurring and the business is organized into units focused on imaging, ultrasound, patient care solutions (such monitoring and maternal infant care) and pharmaceutical diagnostics. It employs about 51,000 people around the world, roughly 7,000 of them in the United States and Canada.
Reporting to GE HealthCare President & CEO Peter Arduini, Kass-Hout will help drive GE HealthCare’s D3 precision care strategy, a framework and digital products that emphasize the company’s smart devices, aligned to disease states and enabled by digital. The company said D3 brings data and insights together to optimize the clinical and patient journey and enhances the company's ability to enable precision care.
In his new role, Kass-Hout will work in partnership with GE HealthCare’s four business segments, regions, and global engineering and machine learning (ML) teams to drive growth through clinical research, patient-centric innovation and advancements to GE HealthCare’s platforms, and digital and ML capabilities.
The new science and technology organization will be made up of researchers who innovate new technologies for the healthcare ecosystem; the digital organization that executes on digital strategies from software development to device integration and cloud adoption to help drive better clinical decision making and improve patient outcomes; and the region research teams who connect and execute the external engagement strategy and cultivate scientific mindshare and academic partnerships with GE HealthCare’s innovation strategy.
“As a clinician, public servant, and digital heath and ML expert, I am honored to join the GE HealthCare team, whose passion, purpose and commitment to lead the digital transformation and improve outcomes for patients and providers clearly aligns with mine,” said Kass-Hout in a statement. “I am excited about what lies ahead and the incredible opportunity to deliver on GE HealthCare’s purpose of creating a world where healthcare has no limits and establishing a new frontier in advancing diagnostics and personalized therapeutics to people.”
The company said he will define and lead a customer-driven enterprise-wide innovation and clinical strategy, integrating the most pressing clinical priorities with a multi-year technology strategy focused on new product introductions that support care pathways, R&D investment prioritization and a team with diversity of thought and capabilities to fuel clinical advancements, growth, and innovation.
