by
Gus Iversen, Editor in Chief | December 14, 2016
HCB News: How did this emphasis on software innovation come around?
FVH: Health care is a fairly siloed world and Philips has had the notion of patient-centric care for a long time. If you want to connect doctors and patients in a different way — more focused on an ongoing constant relationship rather than an acute and episodic relationship where maybe it comes too late and at a great cost — then you need to leverage software and the cloud.
Jeroen Tas (CEO of Connected Care & Health Informatics at Philips) and myself both have informatics backgrounds and come out of the financial service industry, and we joke: Why do people trust financial health to the cloud but not their physical health? The world of health care has not fully embraced digital technology – in pockets, yes, but broadly no, not yet.
I know many people have spent a ton of money on EHRs but let's not forget that those were primarily focused on claims rather than patient-centric care delivery. So we felt that as Philips is positioned very much in the care pathway — we have the smart systems, we touch patients, we support doctors, that’s what I call in the last yard of the care pathway — we can make our data much more actionable through clinical decision support systems.
We don’t want to replace the doctor. We want to make the doctor more effective and we want to give patients the tools to also manage their own health, so software was an obvious direction for us. We’re quite proud to say 60 percent of our R&D people are in software, and we’ve made a big stride over the last few years reinventing ourselves as a digital company.
HCB News: In what ways is innovating software a different venture than innovating hardware?
FVH: Indeed, the product development process is different. We use Scaled Agile for software development, it’s a methodology where groups of people work together in so-called "sprints" and there’s always a customer rep in those sprints to make sure we develop the right functionality and applications.
In hardware development, systems development, the whole path for a new product is much longer than in software. In software you can have a minimal viable product then an augmented product, and you can release new versions incrementally over a period of months, for example, whereas in systems development the cycle for breakthrough technology could easily be four years and it comes with a huge systems integration effort.
The
IQon Spectral CT, for example, had a long development cycle.
