The major networking

Not all major projects announce themselves with a big bang. Some of them sneak in through the back door quietly, softly, and unnoticed. Have you noticed, for example, that we are in the midst of one of the largest and most important German digitalization projects? That’s right. This is because the digital networking of our health system affects more than 80 million patients, about 400,000 doctors, nearly 100,000 medical practices, several thousand hospitals and rehabilitation facilities, as well as several hundred health IT companies where many thousands of people work. As for me, personally, I have never encountered any other project of this magnitude in my entire professional life.

In projects of this type, the challenge lies in the rapid potentiation of knowledge during the initiation of the project. New knowledge is not just reflected in direct medical care, but also in the process chains. IT systems which are designed and programmed nowadays must take this continuous change process into account. If we, as a health IT company, want to make a valuable contribution to the mammoth project “Networking the healthcare system”, we must develop solutions which are so specific that they fulfill the users’ very concrete requirements and are simultaneously so variable in terms of architecture and the care concept that they can take future processes into account.

Nonetheless, we should not lose sight of the actual objective – including from the perspective of VISUS. Medical knowledge is spread out. Medical information about a patient is stored at different locations. For optimal treatment, many people – doctors, therapists, patients, pharmacists, scientists from many organizations – must cooperate with each other. Simply put, this means to me that we have to keep the cooperation of the parties in the healthcare sector in mind when developing products.

That the dimension of this overall project is rarely apparent in its entirety is also due to the fact that a project of this scale must be broken down into many subsections in order to be comprehensible, practicable, and feasible. We do not need to (and do not wish to) address all of the parties with our software solutions as a target group. However, we know what the relationship is between our target groups, that is, hospitals, medical practices and rehabilitation facilities, and the other parties. And we ensure that, with our solutions, we create data transfer points – technological information hubs through which medical data can go from one party to another. In this way, we can help our clients build a digital network in-house which, as a part of the major networking project, contributes to the entire project.

But it is also clear that the industry cannot manage the networking alone. It is absolutely essential that other healthcare service providers as well do their homework, which can be summarized in a simple triad: digitalize medical information, consolidate data – and, finally, network.