In its first days as a standalone company, GE HealthCare has already hit the ground running.
Barely 24 hours after virtually ringing the Nasdaq opening bell to signify its entry onto the market last week, the company announced its first major hire as an independent entity, tapping Taha Kass-Hout, M.D., to serve as its inaugural chief technology officer.
Kass-Hout will lead GE HealthCare’s newly created science and technology organization, helping drive what GE has termed its “D3” strategy, which aims to help healthcare providers tackle diseases with digital-enabled devices. He’ll work across the entire company to grow its clinical research and innovation efforts and build out its digital platforms along with its digital and artificial intelligence capabilities.
“As a cardiologist, digital and [machine learning] expert, Taha has exceptional clinical and technology experience,” CEO Peter Arduini said in the announcement. “Under his leadership, our new science and research organization will drive greater end-to-end alignment within our key research and product development segments to deliver innovative solutions that transform the future of healthcare and enhance our ability to enable precision care.”
Kass-Hout joins GE HealthCare fresh off a nearly six-year stint at Amazon. At the tech giant, he served as vice president of machine learning and as chief medical officer for Amazon and its Amazon Web Services cloud computing offshoot. During that time, he had a hand in the development of the Amazon Lab COVID-19 testing initiative, Amazon HealthLake data storage service and Amazon Omics analytics service for sequencing data, among several others.
Other highlights from Kass-Hout’s two-decade career include a pair of appointments at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under the Obama administration. From 2009 to 2013, he served as director of health informatics solutions and operations at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which included overseeing the launch of Biosense 2.0, a healthcare data-sharing project that was also the department’s first completely cloud-hosted program.
After that, Kass-Hout was named the FDA’s first chief health informatics officer, a position he held through mid-2016. His time at the FDA also included simultaneous postings as the agency’s chief technology officer, director of its office of health informatics and more.
In its first few days since leaving the General Electric nest as a standalone company, GE HealthCare has received a warm welcome to the market. It debuted Wednesday morning with shares priced at $54.30 apiece and has since watched that number tick steadily upward. It reached a high of nearly $62 last Thursday morning and, as of Friday midday, was hovering around $58.50, nearly 8% higher than its starting point.