Philips Sees a 360° View with Emphasis on the Health Continuum

Highlighting the health continuum from healthy living through to early diagnosis, treatment, recovery, and return to everyday life, Duncan Porter, head of field marketing for imaging at Philips Health Systems (Best, The Netherlands) provided some insights on the company’s unique strategy and latest developments in connectivity and tumor tracking with IntelliSpace Portal 7.0, its latest informatics solution.

Articulating the role of radiology at the core of the health continuum, this year, Philips is promoting a direct strategy to focus commercial activity through the lens of the patient. Mr. Porter emphasized the importance of addressing health across the continuum of health, disease, recovery and beyond.

“We want to put ourselves in the same boat as our customers. Effectively, their success is our success,” said Mr. Porter. He stressed that healthcare systems around the world are clearly not sustainable and an integrated, holistic view needs to be taken. “Radiology is right at the heart of this continuum particularly around early diagnosis and treatment phases.”

Looking back at the key milestones in the history of CT, Philips has been at the forefront of driving innovations that have revolutionized clinical practice. Most recently, the launch of IQon, the world’s first detector based spectral CT scanner, enables quantitative imaging techniques including retrospective spectral analysis helping radiologists be far more specific about a definitive diagnosis. This has a direct impact on the personalized treatment pathway for those patients.

Mr. Porter illustrates the capabilities of IQon with an example. He described how a patient who presents with acute abdominal pain might have a kidney stone diagnosed with a low dose CT scan. However, with use of retrospective spectral data, it is now possible to determine the characteristics of that kidney stone, which will determine the nature of treatment – drugs or shockwave treatment. He stressed that the detector-based technology had no trade-off in workflow or increases in dose, unlike other spectral CT imaging techniques.

Again, emphasizing the unique positon of Philips across the health continuum, Mr. Porter also highlighted the importance of connectivity throughout the patient journey. In particular, he discussed how Multi-Modality Tumor Tracking, based on IntelliSpace Portal 7, can be used as a single platform that connects radiologists and referring physicians across clinical domains.

This technology can integrate with multiple modalities, hospital information systems (HIS), picture archiving and communication system (PACS) and radiology information systems (RIS). Clinicians can review and complete cases from virtually any location. It also offers clinical applications covering cardiology, vascular, oncology, neurology, and other clinical domains.

In the case of cancer treatment, radiologists and oncologists can determine tumor activity across the patient’s treatment course. In this respect, Mr. Porter explained the functional benefits of this advanced visualization technology. “We can link these studies together and make quantitative analysis of tumor activity, whether growing or shrinking or not changing, and at this point treatment decisions can be made based on quantitative data,” he said. “The communication tools also enable the different medical specialties to talk to each other.”

Multi-Modality Tumor Tracking was launched at RSNA 2014 but showcased at this year’s ECR meeting.

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