All Together Now: A New Era for Doctors, Clinicians and Patients
Healthcare stands on the brink of a revolution. The digital transformation that has swept through industries including retail, entertainment and finance, is on course to profoundly change the way medicine is practiced.
Digital tools allow healthcare providers to collect, analyze and access a vast treasure trove of medical data. Decisions about care are being made faster and more accurately than ever before, as clinicians draw upon centralized databases for comprehensive information and advice on choosing the most effective course of treatment for patients.
High levels of connectivity between doctors, clinicians and patients now allow for more effective information sharing in real time, bringing vast improvements in treatment, care and patient satisfaction. Meanwhile, as cost pressures challenge health systems and the needs of aging populations spiral, digital technology promises to dramatically improve healthcare outcomes while delivering better value.
Harnessing Greater Connectivity
The key to digital transformation in healthcare is implementing digital platforms that enhance connectivity across organizations, and serve as repositories for data from hospitals, clinics, patients and medical research facilities. These platforms offer data and apps that help medical staff assess patients, diagnose their conditions and recommend the most effective treatments. They also allow healthcare operators to monitor, measure and improve the performance of their organization’s medical activities.
So, what should healthcare providers look for when choosing the right platform for their organization? A key consideration is finding a platform that makes it easy to integrate existing and future applications into one system. Ideally, an organization will deploy a single platform across their infrastructure rather than using several different platforms. When making this choice, it is crucial that healthcare providers are confident that the platform can handle their data securely and conform to privacy regulations.
One of the largest and most effective global healthcare platforms is the teamplay digital health platform by Siemens Healthineers, to which some 5,000 institutions and 23,000 systems in 60 countries worldwide are connected. It offers healthcare providers the flexibility to tailor operations to the needs and legislation of each nation.
The teamplay digital health platform is a prime enabler of digital transformation for healthcare providers with the goal to turn data into cost savings and better care. It allows clinical and operational data to be shared by doctors, clinicians and administrators across the organization, and between organizations. The platform facilitates easy access to solutions for operational, clinical and shared decision support, combining flexibility, scalability and connectedness for healthcare providers´ future readiness.
It includes transformative as well as AI powered applications—developed by Siemens Healthineers and curated third-party providers. With its growing marketplace of applications, it enables operational efficiency and clinical effectiveness. Moreover, it allows providers to expand their digital presence at their own speed, by making available software-as-a-service apps and dialing computing power up or down according to requirements.
“We, at Siemens Healthineers, know that the dynamics of the digital transformation in healthcare can make the lives of caregivers and patients easier. However, it is neither efficient nor sufficient just to add a singular and isolated solution to the palette of already existing offerings,” says Wido Menhardt, Executive Vice President Digital Health, Siemens Healthineers.
The platform can process different data formats, structure them and turn them into a valuable resource for an application. It operates using a variety of medical industry standards such as DICOM, the international standard for storing and transmitting digital medical imagery, and others including IHE, FHIR and HL7. Utilizing these common standards, the teamplay digital health platform allows different health information systems to work together. By this it already supports the accessibility of more than 10 Mio. patient records across institutions.
The teamplay digital health platform balances elastic cloud-based services such as on-demand computation, data storage and data sharing with on-premises edge computing to enable data roundtrips, and data minimization and anonymization. This is achieved by leveraging the benefits of both cloud and edge technologies. This combination is called hybrid computing and enables the platform to serve the health provider’s specific use cases.
Another attractive feature of the teamplay digital health platform is secure end-to-end data sharing. This ensures that data can be transferred from a hospital environment to an outside network and back using a privacy-by-design approach, meaning that privacy protections are built into the system rather than bolted on later.
The platform supports compliance with the HIPAA and GDPR standard and was again awarded the European EuroPriSe Seal in 2019 and is certified compliant with the ISO27001 information security standard, one of the primary requirements that health service cybersecurity directors demand from a platform technology.
In modern health systems, data is flooding in from scans, diagnostic tests and treatment results. It is estimated that the average hospital generates 665 terabytes of data each year—45,000 times the size of Netflix’s movie archive.
The sheer scale of health data requires advanced tools to analyze, process and access it, and digital health platforms are tailor-made for such tasks. Over the coming decade, health systems will switch over to digital health platforms as they respond to the rapidly escalating healthcare demands of the modern world.
Although new players, including some U.S. technology giants, are looking to enter this market, health providers should consider choosing a platform developed by an organization with long experience in healthcare and with extensive knowledge of the inner workings of hospital services. The teamplay digital health platform draws on Siemens Healthineers’ deep knowledge about the needs of healthcare systems. The company is convinced the platform can be a bridge to a better world of care.
The teamplay digital health platform
Written by David Benady for Bloomberg Media Studios
