28.10.2021

Siemens Healthineers joins the CleverHealth Network collaboration

In the picture Ossi Koskinen and Hanna Salmela

Siemens Healthineers has joined the CleverHealth Network ecosystems coordinated by Helsinki University Hospital (HUS). Siemens Healthineers in Finland provides the partnership with their strong expertise on the development and commercialisation of digital solutions in the health care sector.

The unique environment of HUS supports development work and innovations

Ossi Koskinen works at Siemens Healthineers as a Corporate Key Account Executive. He starts our discussion by highlighting the unique role of HUS as an exceptionally large and advanced hospital on national and global scale. HUS already forms a highly competent ecosystem on its own, offering an excellent development and innovation platform to virtual and remote solutions of health care. This is something that Siemens Healthineers is highly interested in, too.

According to Ossi Koskinen, Siemens Healthineers joining the CHN partnership will further strengthen the dialogue between Siemens Healthineers and HUS, both locally and globally. It will also bring about opportunities to promote the launch of new projects and bring in new investments to Finland.

Varian and Siemens Healthineers bring in their respective strengths to the CHN collaboration

Varian, which has been working with the CleverHealth Network already, was integrated to Siemens Healthineers earlier this year. The strengths of both organisations are now at the disposal of CleverHealth Network: Varian continues their advanced development work focusing on the treatment on cancer, whilst Siemens Healthineers brings in their specialised expertise in the development of digital solutions of the health care, in particular the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the analytics of imaging diagnostics and diagnostics archive.

Strengths: ecosystem thinking, experience of AI-based solutions and earlier collaboration with hospitals  

Hanna Salmela, who is the Country manager, Digital services for Finland and Baltics,  is also looking forward to the CHN collaboration. She explains that ecosystem thinking is deeply embedded in the DNA of Siemens Healthineers. The digital imaging solutions developed at Siemens Healthineers allow for a seamless integration of systems developed by other companies,  whether small companies or even competitors. Hanna says: “Siemens Healthineers offers an extensive portfolio in equipment solutions for imaging and lab diagnostics, complete with software solutions. This makes us an exceptional actor in the health care sector.”

Ossi adds: ”The extensive data lake of HUS is unique, and the innovation activities are extremely vibrant. The global expertise on imaging solutions provided by Siemens Healthineers brings a new piece to the partnership puzzle and we hope it will speed up the co-development within the CleverHealth Network.” Siemens Healthineers portfolio boasts more than 60 AI-based solutions approved for clinical usage, and which are already used daily at the hospitals. The competence to bring AI-based solutions to practice is also available for the CHN collaboration. Siemens Healthineers and Varian work together to build a comprehensive, digitalised and patient-centric care path for cancer treatment, spanning from diagnostics to post-treatment follow-up.

Harnessing AI to optimise patient-centric care paths

Siemens Healthineers wants to be part of the activities where more seamless and patient-centric care paths are being created. The decision-making tools enriched with AI developed at Siemens Healthineers are used to treat prostate cancer and lung cancer, for instance. As the imaging and diagnostics needs increase, the decision making within care paths need to be accelerated to avoid bottlenecks in care and delays in treatments. The strong background of Siemens Healthineers as a developer of AI solutions plays an important role in these collaboration activities.  What is more, the long-term collaboration with hospitals has equipped Siemens Healthineers with the consultative knowhow on end-to-end health care solutions, equipment, and ICT solutions that for its part will also benefit the CHN partnership.

To sum up, Ossi Koskinen brings up one of the future-looking visions of Siemens Healthineers, where each person would have a health-related digital twin. All test results related to wellbeing and illnesses would be accessible in real time, and the data would be comprehensively used to prevent illnesses and for the planning of personalised care paths.