Kees Wesdorp
‘It’s all about the people behind the images’, said Kees Wesdorp, Chief Business Leader of Precision Diagnosis at Philips. In other words, the company is seeking to understand the biggest challenges of customers and patients and address them with differentiating solutions. And while digitisation certainly is an important factor in this, Wesdorp feels that technology shouldn’t advance only for its own benefit: ‘I would not talk about “becoming digital” as it seems out of date,’ he said. ‘We’ve been digital for a long time – it’s about what we do with all that information.’
With this, he touches upon a central issue for many medical professionals: According to recent Future Health Index 2022 global report commissioned by Philips, many radiology leaders place data management among their top issues. ‘In many ways, the diagnostic process has never been as challenging and as complicated as it is today,’ Wesdorp stated – not least due to what he calls ‘an explosion of data’; a projected annual increase of healthcare data by 36% by 2025. This, together with the additional workload during the Covid-19 pandemic, and a rising number of complex and chronic disease cases, is putting significant strain on medical staff, resulting in burnout and decreased diagnostic performance.
To meet these challenges, Philips declared it will focus on optimising clinical workflows, using the abundance of data for a more orchestrated, more automated and more consistent patient pathway. Wesdorp: ‘Our AI-powered technologies and software defined systems help turn relevant data into actionable insights to increase diagnostic confidence and improve clinical outcomes.’ For example, new image processing and reconstruction techniques are geared towards more efficient handling of scans while saving time, while automated breakage prediction reduces system downtime to a minimum.
Source: Healthcare in Europe
