One-on-One With Janet Dillione, CEO, Health Services Business Unit, Siemens Healthcare, Part II

DILLIONE: I think that it definitely gives us a leg up to the more strategic buyer who’s looking for a company like Siemens Healthcare that pours an enormous amount of R&D into our products. You know, we just don’t invest in healthcare IT but into MRIs and CTs, and diagnostics. I would suspect this is similar to some of the other large vendors where the hospitals are really not just customers anymore, they are partners. You have such a tight relationship. It’s like a marriage; you hold each other accountable, but you’re there for the long haul.

In terms of our vision, Siemens didn’t acquire SMS (2000) just to have a HIS company. What Siemens really was looking for was not just an IT competency, a market share, a customer position, but really a platform upon which to deliver personalized healthcare. I tell folks that it’s been frustrating because it’s taken us longer. It’s been hard to build Soarian, but we weren’t building Soarian just for my business unit, we were building it as an asset to Siemens Healthcare. It’s the platform that we’re putting out there to build out software as we work to deliver personalized medicine.

And I’d say in the last 10 years Siemens has spent $17 billion on acquisitions, and the most recent ones are DPC Diagnostics. I think you’re looking at Siemens Healthcare as a company that’s entering its second generation of integration. The first was to get the acquisitions under its belt to make sure that businesses were established and stabilized. I can tell you we’re now turning up the engines because it’s time to realize the value proposition, the value from integration. Again, the Holy Grail, the real pursuit here, is personalized medicine. It’s having all those bytes from the images and the biomarkers and the other data from the diagnostics available on an IT platform, so that we can push that personalized information to the clinicians.

GUERRA: I had seen an article recently in “Genetics in Medicine” that said most of the EHR software out there is not equipped to handle genetic information. Does that make sense?

DILLIONE: I loved that article. We’ve been working with folks, like the University in Manchester, for several years now. We’re now in our fifth year of putting knowledge structures inside Soarian, with the "Plan of Care" release that came out with C6. It’s actually the first beginnings of what will become GA software, but again, it’s going to take multiple, multiple years, and you’ll need certain architectural structures to be able to accommodate the genetic information. It is one of the earliest reasons why, again, we sat in conference rooms early on and had to decide if we were going to exploit Invision or build out a new product line.

I was in the room for the decision, and that was one of the reasons why we were so fanatical that it had to go to the Web. The vision here was around personalized medicine, and we fundamentally believe that the medical knowledge will not be owned by Siemens. It will come from many, many different sources around the globe, with potentially much of it coming from the public domain because of the funding by the NIH. We want it to have an architecture that was open enough so people could, “Go get it and bring it in.” And that has been a part of our decision from the first day, so we’ve quietly been investing in that over the last several years. I’d be shocked if you talked to (GE President and CEO) Vishal (Wanchoo) and you didn’t have similar comments and ideas, but that’s what Siemens and GE do. We’re not just in this for the IT-ness and for the EHR, we’re in it for that larger healthcare goal.

GUERRA: When you look at the Siemens offerings, one thing that stands out to me would be the lack of products in the ambulatory EHR line. Do you plan on building out such a product or pre-integrating with the more prominent vendors in that space?

DILLIONE: Well, we have an agreement with NextGen that has gone very well. They’re a good group. Pat Cline is a very smart man that runs a very good company. We host NextGen. They’re live, running out of our ASP cloud computing center, if you will, in Malvern. It’s been a very good relationship, and we have interoperability across Invision, Soarian, and NextGen and we will continue to make those investments, but the market is the market. We will always watch the market and do what we need to do to stay competitive. Again, we don’t have an intention of being a short-term player here. We see the health systems building out, and we’ll continue to make decisions to support our future in that market.