Industry news: Technology to prevent disease

While increasing urbanisation and larger populations that are expected to live for longer are likely to place extreme pressure on health services to deliver improved healthcare at lower costs, e-healthcare has the technology to deliver solutions that will accommodate this need.

Francois Nolte, Business Manager at Siemens Medical Solutions, says e-healthcare offers a solution to the challenge facing today's healthcare provider, namely how to serve more patients with fewer resources.

“Through the correct application of healthcare transforming technologies like imaging, clinical information technology, minimally invasive therapy and molecular medicine, hospitals are going to become more personalised and more patient-centric, and able to provide earlier diagnosis and intervention, disease orientation, knowledge based decision support and integrated IT systems,” says Nolte.

Preventing disease from happening and reducing costs, Nolte believes that molecular medicine will drive this trend towards personalised care.

“One of the most exciting technology happenings of the past few years, molecular medicine is basically medicine and biology coming together,” he says. “In areas like in vitro and in vivo diagnostics, machines that study metrics such as blood and urine are converging in the IT space – a development that will help the industry to both reduce costs and improve healthcare.”

Currently there are two streams of diagnosis: in vivo, which is diagnosing by looking at the body from the outside in, such as x-rays; and in vitro, which is a diagnosis from the inside out, such as blood tests.

“These two streams are on a convergent path with IT, as is the case of patient records, which could provide a very exciting future for healthcare technology,” he says.

Citing the huge technological gains made in dual-source CT scanners, which can be far more effective than single-source and multi-segment scanners, Nolte says that molecular imaging delivers the information faster, since changes in the function of cell activity always precede medical conditions.

”Using molecular imaging to determine the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease can improve a doctor's ability to forecast the patient's future cognitive functions by 30%,” he says. “This early detection can allow the doctor to prescribe the drug Aricept, which is able to delay the onset of Alzheimer's. This is one example of how molecular imaging will continue the transformation taking place in the medical sector. By combining these technologies, patient diagnosis can be made sooner because all information will be consolidated. In general, the sooner you diagnose an illness, the cheaper the treatment will be. Prevention really is better than cure.”

By putting an intelligent IT layer over the diagnostic tools, Nolte says it creates a pool of information that gives the industry more information about individual patients and the population in general.

“The pool of information will give access to specific information like previous dispensation for disease,” he says. “It's a preventative measure, not a reactive one; medicine is becoming personalised.”

Further information can be found under: http://www.siemens.com/medical

Enquiries: Jose Machado
Siemens Southern Africa
(011) 652-2000

Francois Nolte
Siemens Medical Solutions
(082) 901-0290