Why did Philips release a “Cloud PACS” on CHINC?

Why did Philips release a “Cloud PACS” on CHINC?

Philips showed one on CHINC in an “unusual” gesture.

At this professional conference on medical informatization, Philips displayed medical informatization solutions covering major departments such as radiology, pathology, and critical care medicine, targeting the clinical diagnosis and research needs of major diseases such as cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, and tumors.

Since this year, Philips has become more and more clear about its positioning.

In February this year, Group CEO Frans van Houten also stated: In the future, Philips will become a leader in health technology. In fact, since 2016, Philips has begun to transform into “health technology”, and launched a series of solutions from healthy lifestyle, disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment and home care around “value-based medicine”.

In addition, Philips has also attracted more partners in the medical field. In the past few years, Philips has made 19 medical technology acquisitions, including the acquisition of the medical information systems business of Carestream Medical in 2019. This is also one of the largest mergers and acquisitions of medical informatization in recent years.

A series of actions are releasing a signal: Philips is trying to expand its medical territory beyond the equipment side it is good at.

A hospital is not an IT company

At CMEF 2018, Philips and Shenzhou Medical jointly released “Shenfeiyun 1.0”, realizing the “cloud platform” solution of “Philips Nebula Computer Imaging Aided Diagnosis System” (IntelliSpace Portal), changing the original “single machine” that customers must purchase in sets. Version” or “Enterprise Edition” mode, providing customers with personalized package customization services based on “cloud platform”.

That is to say, customers can choose the corresponding application modules on the “Philips Nebula Platform” according to their actual application needs and budgets.

A year later, still at CMEF, Philips and Shenzhou Medical jointly released “Shenfeiyun 2.0”.

Shenfeiyun 2.0 is based on the 1.0 technology platform and developed for the application scenario of accurate early screening and early diagnosis of lung cancer, a set of integrated solutions that meet international standards, aiming at the pain points of lung cancer screening and providing data It provides full-process services such as acquisition, image reconstruction, image post-processing, result analysis, and auxiliary diagnosis and treatment.

Going back to the new Shenfei Cloud 3.0 “Cloud PACS” released this time, what is the reason for its release?

Previously, a partner of Philips and the relevant person in charge of Shenzhou Medical once told Lei Feng.com that the hospital itself is not an IT company, and the hospital’s IT engineers and huge IT room account for a large amount of the hospital’s operating costs. “It will definitely change in the next ten years. The construction of medical informatization will shift from local to cloud.”

Take PACS as an example, the traditional purchase and self-build PACS model will require fixed asset investment, purchase of warranty, continuous expansion and update storage. The annual system upgrade is another investment. At the same time, the self-built model also requires the hospital to establish its own IT management team, which will result in the consumption of computer rooms and resources, as well as potential data migration risks.

In September 2012, the China-Japan Friendship Hospital took the lead in building a hospital-level PACS system, realizing a seamless link between the imaging department and the hospital-wide HIS system.

However, due to the growth of business, the PACS system also faces unavoidable industrial problems such as storage bottleneck and data security. The concept of cloud PACS also caters to the long-term pain point of “transfer” of image data. It is more inclusive for breaking geographical restrictions and brand restrictions, and is especially suitable for the sharing of medical images in regions and medical alliances.

Of course, the comprehensive cloud migration of hospital PACS is also driven by the general trend of “medical reform”.

On July 23, the General Office of the State Council issued the “Key Tasks for Deepening the Reform of the Medical and Health System in the Second Half of 2020”, which emphasized the key tasks of deepening the medical reform in the second half of 2020, including: “Continue to promote the construction of regional medical centers, promote hierarchical diagnosis and treatment and Medical and health informatization construction, solid health poverty alleviation.”

Therefore, in the second half of this year, the focus of each hospital is to promote hierarchical diagnosis and treatment, the construction of medical alliances and the construction of hospital informatization, and the state will also give corresponding support.

Under such policy guidance, customers’ demands for images are still very obvious.

Zhu Chenfeng, Senior Director of Strategic Key Accounts of Philips Greater China, said, “This is also one of the reasons why the country has been promoting imaging poverty alleviation. We hope to use Philips’ technology and the big data of Shenzhou Medical Cloud Platform to use Shenfeiyun’s solutions to assist primary medical care. Informatization construction.”

Three main types of user objects

According to Leifeng.com (public account: Leifeng.com), Philips cloud PACS services are mainly divided into three categories: in-hospital cloud PACS services, medical consortium services and digital imaging services.

For users, the difficulty of getting started with Shenfeiyun’s cloud PACS is not the product itself, but is subject to the hospital’s own level of informatization, target demands and budget.

On-premises deployment is a kind of asset investment similar to “one-shot buying and selling”, and Shenfeiyun’s investment can be regarded as an operating cost: in the form of a front-end machine at the front end, all data operations, data storage and data The circulation is provided through the SAAS service in the cloud.

From the perspective of the first type of cloud PCAS service, in some individual hospitals, due to the lack of equipment, the overall level of PACS construction is relatively backward, and the cloud medical services (two-dimensional and three-dimensional image processing and image storage PACS circulation) are on the contrary. is a more economical and realistic way.

For some tertiary hospitals with independent procurement authority, the state is also “putting pressure” on them in terms of medical associations and medical communities.

Of course, an important consideration in taking the cloud form is cost and flexibility.

Zhu Chenfeng said frankly that before, whether it was its own PACS or Nebula workstation, it was necessary to purchase a complete set. The cloud service model allows hospitals to purchase applications according to the needs of department construction. “For example, for scientific research needs, we will have CT labor, and for clinical multimodal consultation. This is like an APP on a mobile phone. How many Use as much as you want.”

From the perspective of the second type of service, the goal of cloud PACS is to improve the overall diagnosis and treatment capabilities of acute and complex diseases. There are more than 5,500 community health centers and 4,000 township workstations across the country. How these grassroots forces that undertake the task of “first diagnosis” connect with the top three hospitals is an important part of the implementation of the hierarchical diagnosis and treatment policy.

Therefore, providing cross-institutional and cross-regional image collaborative diagnosis functions between different medical institutions, or between medical institutions and doctors, has become a key link for various manufacturers at present.

From the perspective of the third type of service, digital image service is the use of network storage, transmission and viewing of digital film.

Zhu Chenfeng gave a set of data: the hospital consumes 50 boxes of film per month, the cost of each film is about 18 yuan, and the cost of film in the hospital reaches 112,500 yuan per month. These costs are also shared by patients. From a cost perspective, digital film is also a more economical way.

According to the statistics of the HIT expert network, as early as 2017, Beijing Second Hospital launched the “image sharing platform”, becoming the first hospital in the country to realize the diagnosis-level image sharing service. In the same year, Shaoxing City People’s Hospital launched the “Cloud Film” project, which can save citizens about 8 million yuan in film costs each year.

In 2019, the Shanghai Shenkang Hospital Development Center launched a regional-level “image cloud film query service”, covering 38 municipal hospitals in the city. Citizens can view their examination images and reports in any of them through the WeChat public account and app, and also Images can be shared with clinicians through QR codes, reducing the number of repeated filming and unnecessary medical expenses.

Therefore, providing a patient-oriented image access portal for hospitals or independent medical institutions, where patients can authorize access to their own image examination data through mobile devices outside the hospital, is the third purpose of cloud PACS.

Especially since the epidemic, no contact has become a small trend in the whole society, and the medical field has increasingly recognized the direction of digital imaging.

An important step in Philips’ transformation

A clear trend in the medical industry is that global medical institutions are beginning to transform into value-oriented service-oriented medical institutions, and clinicians are faced with challenges such as simplifying data processes and reducing medical costs.

Looking back, the cloud PACS in Shenfeiyun 3.0 seems to focus more on the underlying data governance and data interoperability. In the previous version, 2.0 included the diagnostic module thing. Why put the relatively low-level core functions on the agenda this time?

Zhu Chenfeng said that the PACS module in version 3.0 is an important module in the transformation of Shenfei Cloud platform.

“Why is it important? It’s because it opens up all the underlying data, combines image data with the underlying data, and realizes the coordination and resource sharing of the entire imaging process, otherwise it cannot be said to be an end-to-end full-process solution. . To achieve true remote diagnosis, remote referral, remote education or remote workflow management, it can only be done on the premise of this true image fusion and data access.”

In recent years, we can see a very obvious trend of device manufacturers: the combination of soft and hard.

Zhu Chenfeng believes that the combination of software and hardware of medical device manufacturers is essentially a homogeneous competition on the hardware side. Under the premise of the principle of inclusiveness, to realize the sinking of medical resources, it is not simply to reduce the price of equipment, but to bring medical services to primary hospitals.

“From hardware to the combination of software and hardware. From simple equipment to the service system of the entire solution, it must be the general trend of the entire industry.”

Regarding the market rhythm of cloud PACS in the future, Zhu Chenfeng told Leifeng.com that in order to occupy the market as soon as possible, the team has not yet formulated a very specific phased plan.

“We are more like maintaining an open ecosystem, and we agree with modularity. Philips was originally a very traditional imaging company and a traditional equipment provider. If we are based on equipment + technology + services, we can connect people, equipment, Some barriers in all aspects of data.”

To the outside world, Philips has been seeking a transformation and has gone through several stages. In the first stage, the lighting business will be divested and more focus on health technology; in the second stage, ten solutions will be launched to get rid of the hat of “single equipment provider”.

In the latest plan, Philips will focus on the layout of the medical industry in the post-epidemic era, and make further efforts in digitalization and intelligence.

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