Why GE HealthCare is training clinicians on AI

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Merging technology and medical practice has never been easy (see the ongoing plight of electronic health records). Lately, there’s been a new type of technology for clinicians to learn that you may have heard mentioned here and there: AI.

Whether it’s scribes or imaging scanners, providers are being asked more frequently to incorporate AI into their practices. But providers are trained in medicine, not data science.

That’s why on May 19, GE HealthCare launched a new initiative to make 20 hours of healthcare AI training, called HelloAI Professional, at no cost.

Jan Beger, global head of AI advocacy for GE HealthCare, spoke with Healthcare Brew about this new resource and why the medical device company is stepping up to educate clinicians.

“When a clinician gets decision support through AI, they need to understand at least to some extent what AI does in the background,” Beger said. “They don’t need to become data scientists…but they should at least get some glimpse into the decision-making process of the AI model.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you make the decision to make the HelloAI program free now? What are your goals by expanding training access?

We started with this initiative in 2018. This was the time when AI really slowly started making a difference in healthcare, but only with so-called point solutions. The reason why we believe now is the time for large-scale AI fluency and AI education is because AI now has the potential to address much broader, higher-impact use cases. You have heard of foundation models or agentic AI—those kinds of technologies will make a substantial difference going forward. And therefore, we believe the time is now to really focus on equipping the healthcare workforce—and not just nurses and surgeons but also health system leaders—to enable them with the skills, the knowledge, and the mindset to thrive in the era of AI-enabled healthcare.

What does the training offer?

It’s a variety of different things. First, we have a module called HelloAI Foundations. It’s about a one-hour course helping with clarifying terminology. This is very important. If you want to get into AI conversations very quickly, you’ll use terms such as “deep learning,” “this black box,” “large language model,” and those kinds of things. Usually healthcare professionals do not really know what those mean, so to a large extent it’s just clarification of this technological terminology to be able to have informed conversations. This is by far the learning module which is used the most across the globe right now.

Then we have a second offering, which is called HelloAI Professional. This is about 20 hours of learning content, a deep dive into a variety of different fields in healthcare from different clinical domains to administrative use cases. We invite, for example, startup founders that show their technologies, the problems they are trying to address. We have scientists, data scientists, AI experts, clinical leaders talking to us. It’s really a deep dive into healthcare AI.

Why did GE HealthCare in particular take on this initiative?

GE HealthCare is leading the number of FDA authorizations in terms of AI and machinery and medical devices for four years in a row with 120 devices. As a leader, we feel like we have the responsibility to not just build valuable, high-impact AI technologies within our solutions, products, devices, and software. We feel we need to make sure the workforce is ready for this transformational shift that’s going to happen within the next decade.