Driving the digitalisation of healthcare in Asia Pacific

Cloud-based network teamplay and third-party offerings at the heart of ecosystem.

Siemens Healthineers is presenting its solutions for the future of digital healthcare at HiMSS AsiaPac Conference 2017. The company will also introduce its new digital platform which enables healthcare providers to leverage on big data and turn it into actionable insights.

Digitalization is changing the way healthcare is delivered. A lack of interoperability of healthcare systems has made it difficult in the past to utilize data for the benefit of patients and healthcare providers alike. Studies suggest that 80 percent of health data is unstructured and stored in hundreds of forms such as lab results, images, and medical transcripts.

The question is how to use this big data effectively and channel it for the benefit of the healthcare provider.

Siemens Healthineers is designing a Digital Ecosystem with the goal to foster innovation and collaboration and provide deep insights into the clinical and operational performance of healthcare facilities.

Data from imaging devices marks the starting point of the Siemens Healthineers Digital Ecosystem feeding progressive applications for clinical and operational benchmarking and performance improvement and data and knowledge exchange with experts beyond their own institution. Besides Siemens developed applications, external partner applications will be added to the Ecosystem. To support the innovation power of external application developers, Siemens Healthineers has designed the Ecosystem with an open Application Programming Interface (API) to easily integrate into new third-party offerings.

The goal is to attract the best solutions and technology developers worldwide and to make their innovative applications accessible to the user in a fast and easy manner.

Siemens Healthineers cloud-based network teamplay serves as the Ecosystem’s technical backbone. Currently more than 1,100 hospitals from all over the world – and thereof more than 200 in Asia Pacific – are sending statistical and anonymized clinical data into the cloud, having amassed several million data records.

teamplay aggregates and visualizes those data for analytics and enables collaboration and sharing of insights. This way, healthcare professionals are able to identify improvement potential, e.g. when it comes to the level of utilization of their imaging devices or the associated radiation doses.

The Digital Ecosystem can supply healthcare providers with aggregated data for different use cases. Furthermore, global knowledge exchange is a very important instrument in medicine to improve patient care. The Siemens Healthineers Digital Ecosystem will allow experts to link and communicate with their peers worldwide.

Worldwide, an estimated 350 million people suffer from rare diseasesii where diagnosis and treatment is particularly difficult due to a lack of reference cases. Here, the Digital Ecosystem with its large pool of data might be useful in the future. Users could also utilize Artificial Intelligence to identify reference cases with similar patterns.

“Introducing the Digital Ecosystem marks a significant milestone for Siemens Healthineers in Asia Pacific – it underlines our ambition to be a digital leader in the region – and globally”, said Enno Nehrbass, Head of Strategy and Digital Services Asia Pacific, Siemens Healthineers.

“We want to actively shape the way digital solutions are being applied in the field of healthcare to benefit healthcare providers and patients”, explained Elisabeth Staudinger, President of Siemens Healthineers in Asia Pacific. “I’m convinced that our Ecosystem can be a great help in paving the way for the digitalization of healthcare.”