Auckland District Health Board and InterSystems Corporation announced a strategic partnership to deliver a modern, extensible and fit-for-purpose Patient Administration System.

The InterSystems TrakCare® solution will streamline business processes and workflows, replacing three patient management systems.

The TrakCare Patient Administration System will enable proactive communication with care providers across the region and in the community. It will also deliver a better patient and wh?nau experience through new capabilities such as customer centric appointment bookings.

The staff using the system will benefit from a modern, easy to use interface, more efficient workflows and secure access from their mobile devices.

Implementation of the cloud-based system will commence in January 2022. It will serve multiple facilities across Auckland – including Auckland City Hospital, Starship Children’s Hospital and community organisations – supporting around 145,000 inpatient and one million outpatient visits per year.

TrakCare’s comprehensive capabilities also allow it to be extended to meet Auckland DHB’s longer-term goals. This includes rationalising the number of applications required to meet its functional requirements, and integrating with a new, common identity and access management platform and data services integration layer to provide improved data sharing with other health providers.

“After extensive market research and a robust tender process we have chosen InterSystems as a strategic partner because its system best suits the needs of our patients, wh?nau and clinical teams, and aligns to Auckland DHB’s Te Tiriti o Waitangi and Tikanga strategies,” said Shayne Tong, Auckland DHB’s Chief Digital Officer.

“InterSystems is delighted to be working in partnership with Auckland District Health Board,” said Darren Jones, Country Manager, Australia and New Zealand for InterSystems. “Together, we can deliver long-lasting and meaningful improvements through the adoption of an innovative system – with a proven track record at six New Zealand hospitals – to support the health and wellbeing of the people of T?maki Makaurau.”

About Auckland DHB

Auckland District Health Board (DHB) provides and funds public health services to the 511,000 people living in central Auckland, as well as regional services for Northland and Greater Auckland and specialist national services for the whole of New Zealand.
We have more than one million patient contacts per year. We operate Auckland City Hospital, Starship Children’s Hospital, Greenlane Clinical Centre and several community-based services and fund healthcare services delivered by GPs, midwives, dental care, pharmacies, aged care residential homes, screening programmes and other NGOs.
We are a major teaching institution, providing training for more than 1000 future doctors, nurses, midwifes and other health professionals every year.

Our primary role is to support our local population to achieve the outcomes they want for themselves, their wh?nau and their community, and to ensure they have access to high quality and safe healthcare. Our approach is patient-centred healthcare, which means the needs of our patients are at the heart of everything we do. We want our community to live well, stay well and get well.

About InterSystems

Established in 1978, InterSystems provides innovative data solutions for organisations with critical information needs in the healthcare, finance and logistics sectors, and beyond. Our cloud-first data platforms solve interoperability, speed and scalability problems for organisations around the globe. InterSystems also develops and supports data management in hospitals through the world’s most proven electronic medical record, as well as unified care records for health systems and governments through a powerful suite of healthcare data integration solutions. The company is committed to excellence through its award-winning, 24×7 support for customers and partners in more than 80 countries. Privately held and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, InterSystems has 25 offices worldwide.

GE Healthcare announced collaborations with SOPHiA GENETICS, The University of Cambridge and Optellum as part of its vision to advance care, make precision health more accessible, and ultimately improve outcomes for cancer patients.

These alliances are intended to help GE Healthcare support integrated health systems at the local level by providing the technology to deploy software across imaging networks and helping to make the newest innovations accessible across the broader population. It is hoped this will enable local oncologists and medical experts to deliver earlier diagnoses and more accurate treatments — a crucial component in achieving positive health outcomes with cancer patients.

“Cross-functional partnerships between organizations are key to the creation of new approaches and intelligent tools that enable cancer to be detected as early as possible and with the greatest degree of accuracy,” said Dr. Ben Newton, Global Head of Oncology Solutions at GE Healthcare. “By partnering with SOPHiA GENETICS, Optellum, and the University of Cambridge, we’re looking to create a more powerful oncology care pathway that promotes high-quality, personalized, and effective medical care.”

GE Healthcare’s comprehensive diagnostic imaging and monitoring portfolio can be deployed throughout the patient’s cancer journey, from initial screening and diagnosis, through therapy guidance facilitating minimally invasive treatment, to monitoring patient progress.

As cases of cancer continue to rise and are predicted to reach 29.5 million new cases per year by 2040[1] there is a growing demand for data-driven medicine, both for clinical practice and clinical trials. GE Healthcare is utilizing its Edison platform to integrate data from diverse sources, such as electronic health records (EHR) and radiology information systems (RIS), imaging and other medical device data. This integrated data can be used to develop and deploy AI enabled solutions to help simplify oncology patient workflows, better understand increasingly complicated clinical patient data, and compare data from patient to patient.

SOPHiA GENETICS and GE Healthcare will be collaborating on opportunities in the healthcare market, including various initiatives and projects in the fields of digital oncology and radiogenomic analysis. The companies will initially work together on the creation of infrastructure to integrate data between GE’s Edison platform and the SOPHiA DDM™ platform, as well as co-marketing and pilot site recruitment across oncology and radiogenomics.

The companies will be deploying GE Healthcare’s extensive medical imaging and monitoring capabilities and Edison platform-enabled data aggregation with the SOPHiA DDM™ cloud-based software-as-a-service analytics genomic insights platform and related solutions, which are available in more than 750 hospitals, laboratories and biopharma companies.

The University of Cambridge, Cambridge University Hospitals and GE Healthcare have agreed to collaborate on developing an application aiming to improve cancer care, with Cambridge providing clinical expertise and data to support GE Healthcare’s development and evaluation of an AI-enhanced application that integrates cancer patient data from multiple sources into a single interface.

Building on research supported by The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research and Cancer Research UK, the collaboration aims to address the problems of fragmented or siloed data and disconnected patient information, which is challenging for clinicians to manage effectively and can prevent cancer patients receiving optimal treatment.

UK-based company Optellum is a leader in AI- decision support for the early diagnosis and optimal treatment of lung cancer. Together, the companies are seeking to address one of the largest challenges in the diagnosis of lung cancer, helping providers to determine the malignancy of a lung nodule: a suspicious lesion that may be benign or cancerous. The majority of incidentally detected pulmonary nodules present an indeterminate cancer risk, which are incredibly challenging for clinicians to diagnose and manage, leading to delayed treatment for cancer patients and invasive procedures on healthy people.

Optellum’s Virtual Nodule Clinic identifies and scores the probability of malignancy in a lung nodule, which is key to determining whether biopsy is necessary, and accelerating diagnosis. It is the only FDA-cleared AI-assisted diagnosis software for early-stage lung cancer[2], and has been shown to improve the sensitivity and specificity of malignancy assessments of indeterminate nodules [3] ­— enabling pulmonologists and radiologists to make optimal clinical decisions[4].

About GE Healthcare:

GE Healthcare is the $17 billion* healthcare business of GE (NYSE: GE). As a leading global medical technology, pharmaceutical diagnostics and digital solutions innovator, GE Healthcare enables clinicians to make faster, more informed decisions through intelligent devices, data analytics, applications and services, supported by its Edison intelligence platform. With over 100 years of healthcare industry experience and around 47,000 employees globally, the company operates at the center of an ecosystem working toward precision health, digitizing healthcare, helping drive productivity and improve outcomes for patients, providers, health systems and researchers around the world.

About SOPHiA GENETICS:

SOPHiA GENETICS is a healthcare technology company dedicated to establishing the practice of data-driven medicine as the standard of care and for life sciences research. It is the creator of the SOPHiA DDM™ Platform, a cloud-based SaaS platform capable of analyzing data and generating insights from complex multimodal data sets and different diagnostic modalities. The SOPHiA DDM™ Platform and related solutions, products and services are currently used by more than 780 hospital, laboratory, and biopharma institutions globally.

About Optellum:

Optellum is a commercial-stage lung health company providing Artificial Intelligence decision support software that assists physicians in early diagnosis and optimal treatment for their patients. The company was founded so that every lung disease patient is diagnosed and treated at the earliest possible stage, when chances of cure are the highest. Optellum has headquarters at the Oxford Centre for Innovation in Oxford, United Kingdom and a U.S. office at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, TX. For more information, visit optellum.com.

About The University of Cambridge:

The University of Cambridge is one of the world’s top ten leading universities, with a rich history of radical thinking dating back to 1209. Its mission is to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

The University comprises 31 autonomous Colleges and 150 departments, faculties and institutions. Its 24,450 student body includes more than 9,000 international students from 147 countries. In 2020, 70.6% of its new undergraduate students were from state schools and 21.6% from economically disadvantaged areas.

Cambridge research spans almost every discipline, from science, technology, engineering and medicine through to the arts, humanities and social sciences, with multi-disciplinary teams working to address major global challenges. Its researchers provide academic leadership, develop strategic partnerships and collaborate with colleagues worldwide.

The University sits at the heart of the ‘Cambridge cluster’, in which more than 5,300 knowledge-intensive firms employ more than 67,000 people and generate £18 billion in turnover. Cambridge has the highest number of patent applications per 100,000 residents in the UK.

About Cambridge University Hospitals:

Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (CUH) is one of the largest and best known trusts in the country, delivering high-quality patient care through Addenbrooke’s and the Rosie Hospitals. CUH is a leading national centre for specialist treatment for rare or complex conditions and a university teaching hospital with a worldwide reputation.

CUH is a key partner in Cambridge University Health Partners (CUHP), one of only six academic health science centres in the UK, and is at the heart of the development of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus (CBC), which brings together on one site world-class biomedical research, patient care and education. As part of the Campus development, Papworth Hospital has created a bespoke, purpose-built hospital, and AstraZeneca is building a new global R&D centre and corporate headquarters. The Campus is one of the Government’s National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) comprehensive biomedical research centres.

CVS Health and Microsoft Corp. announced a new strategic alliance focused on developing innovative solutions to help consumers improve their health, while empowering over 300,000 CVS Health employees – including frontline workers – with tools to better serve more than 100 million people.

CVS Health logoSince the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations in every industry – health care in particular – have grappled with the need to adapt quickly. According to an Economist Intelligence Unit study commissioned by Microsoft, organizations have accelerated transformation initiatives and have begun to rely more heavily on digital tools. From creating hybrid environments to help employees work from home virtually, to deploying new applications to better support frontline workers, digital transformation has become a fundamental necessity for business resilience, accelerating growth, and driving efficiencies.

“We are rapidly transforming into a consumer-centric, integrated health solutions company, taking a digital-first, technology forward approach to all that we do,” said Roshan Navagamuwa, Chief Information Officer, CVS Health. “Business services at this scale requires a new level of partnership. Our collaboration with Microsoft will accelerate this work and empower our employees to provide quality care that is more personal and affordable.”

Customized Care

Microsoft logoThe collaboration with Microsoft will help CVS Health accelerate a data-driven, personalized customer experience, while complying with the company’s patient privacy and confidentiality policies. By combining information from different areas across the company with high agility, CVS Health will enhance its omnichannel pharmacy capabilities and deliver customized health recommendations when and where consumers need them. CVS Health will also scale up retail loyalty and personalization programs that use advanced Machine Learning models running on the cloud computing service Azure.

In addition to creating a more personalized and seamless experience for consumers, data science will also be used to improve access to care and health outcomes. The ability to create a simple, easy-to-use patient experience has been critical to CVS Health’s role in the national COVID-19 vaccination effort, delivering insights and recommendations to ensure equitable and efficient administration of approximately 43 million vaccines.

Enabling Frontline Workers

Throughout the pandemic, CVS Health retail employees have continued to support their communities by staying focused on their day-to-day responsibilities. Through the use of Microsoft Teams and Office products, CVS Health will be more agile, enabling retail employees to more easily consume key information needed to answer common questions and solve customer needs faster.

Digitalizing Operations

CVS Health currently leverages Azure cognitive services like Computer Vision and Text Analytics for Health that automate tasks. In Specialty Pharmacy, for example, CVS Health has digitized intake using these services – including the 40 percent of prescriptions that arrive as paper or fax – helping technicians fill prescriptions, faster and easier than previous methods. Microsoft will continue to expand and partner with CVS Health to reimagine and simplify processes, as part of CVS Health’s technology-driven digitalization program.

Expanding Cloud Services

CVS Health selected Microsoft as a preferred cloud provider for applications based on a successful history of engineering and co-innovation. As a strategic platform, Azure will play a key role in CVS Health’s acceleration of its digital transformation by expanding the company’s already formidable multi-cloud presence to over 1,500 new and existing business applications in Azure cloud.

Innovative Solutions

Microsoft and CVS Health will also explore innovative technology solutions that will support consumers, employees, and ecosystem partners. Microsoft HoloLens, Dynamics 365 Guides, and Remote Assist can simplify complex procedures with intuitive tools to help support CVS Health employees. Microsoft Azure AI and cognitive capabilities can also extend to automate administrative and predictive processes and reduce waste through co-innovation with CVS Health’s deep community presence and health care expertise.

“We are excited to partner with CVS Health on its digital transformation journey, collaborating together on how the company manages health data at scale, improves the customer experience, and drives operational efficiency,” said Judson Althoff, Microsoft’s Chief Commercial Officer. “With the Azure platform and its AI capabilities, we will combine the power of data, the expansive reach of CVS Health’s world-class solutions, and Microsoft Teams to connect health care experts and create customized care and services that enable people to live healthier lives.”

About CVS Health

CVS Health is the leading health solutions company, delivering care like no one else can. We reach more people and improve the health of communities across America through our local presence, digital channels and over 300,000 dedicated colleagues – including more than 40,000 physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and nurse practitioners. Wherever and whenever people need us, we help them with their health – whether that’s managing chronic diseases, staying compliant with their medications, or accessing affordable health and wellness services in the most convenient ways. We help people navigate the health care system – and their personal health care – by improving access, lowering costs and being a trusted partner for every meaningful moment of health. And we do it all with heart, each and every day.

About Microsoft

Microsoft enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Royal Philips, a global leader in health technology, announced that the first patients have been successfully treated using its innovative 3D Augmented Reality (AR) spine navigation solution at Sant Joan de Déu Barcelona Children’s Hospital, Spain, and the Armed Forces Hospital, Oman. For both cases the surgeons used Philips integrated Spine Suite solution that offers the company’s Azurion Hybrid Operating Room (OR) with ClarifEye, an industry-first solution that combines 2D and 3D visualisations at low X-ray dose with 3D AR navigation into one system. This enables surgeons to define and navigate along the critical pathway using this advanced real-time image guidance for precise device placement both in open and minimally invasive spine procedures*.

The first patient treated with ClarifEye at Sant Joan de Déu Barcelona Children’s Hospital involved open image guided surgery on a 12-year-old patient with severe congenital spondylolisthesis, a condition where the spine is misaligned due to a defect in one of the joints. Without treatment, it can affect quality of life and increase the risk of several chronic conditions. Using the Philips’ spine solution, pedicle screws were successfully placed at four spine levels to fuse several lumbar vertebras. “The level of success of this surgery would not have been possible to reach without ClarifEye,” said Dr. Alejandro Peiró, Orthopedic surgeon and pediatric traumatologist at Sant Joan de Déu Barcelona Children’s Hospital.

Head of Department Orthopedics and Spine Surgery at Hospital MoD, Oman
At the Armed Forces Hospital in Muscat, Oman, an adult 51-year-old patient with multi-level degenerative lumbar stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal canal in the lower part of the back, was successfully treated using minimally invasive techniques. “Philips’ new technology enables us to perform less invasive procedures and produce better outcomes for patients with spine conditions,” said Dr. Ahmed Al Jahwari, Head of Department Orthopedics and Spine Surgery at Hospital MoD, Oman. “Thanks to the high quality of the intraoperative cone beam CT imaging and the positioning flexibility of the ClarifEye system, we can ensure that implants are in place which lowers post-operative CT scans to check implant placements.”

Increased clinical accuracy and improved outcomes
Treatment for spine conditions can often be complex and delicate. Surgeons need to take particular care to avoid fragile neurological and vascular structures close to the spine. Such procedures have traditionally been an ‘open surgery’, where surgeons would manually manipulate the patient’s spine to position implants such as pedicle screws. As technology has advanced, there has been a shift to using minimally invasive techniques, such as small incisions in the patient’s skin, minimizing blood loss and soft tissue damage and consequently reducing postoperative pain. In both approaches, surgeons can now use the real-time imaging and 3D navigation of ClarifEye. Intra-operative image guidance increases clinical accuracy and improves outcomes, with patients subject to fewer revision surgeries compared to the previous standard of care [1,2]. Data published in Science Reports demonstrated that ClarifEye performed better in accuracy than open surgery pedicle screw placement without 3D navigation (94% vs 89,6%) [3]. In addition, data from a clinical study using ClarifEye, showed a 98% accuracy of pedicle screw placement during minimally invasive procedures [4].

Growing international adoption

ClarifEye Augmented Reality Surgical Navigation was introduced earlier this year. The sites in Spain and Oman complement the growing international ecosystem of innovation partners that have adopted this new solution such as the University Medical Center Schleswig-Holstein in Kiel, Germany, Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden, the Regional Hospital of Lugano, Switzerland and the Strasbourg University Hospital in France.

“We’re excited that international access to ClarifEye is expanding, and more hospitals and patients will get to experience its benefits firsthand,” said Karim Boussebaa, General Manager Image Guided Therapy Systems at Philips. “As the latest addition to Spine Suite, ClarifEye adds a new dimension in surgical precision for patients. It is a great example of how we’re innovating procedures and helping clinicians to deliver on the Quadruple Aim of better health outcomes, improve patient experience and staff satisfaction, and lower cost of care.”

Philips is a pioneer in Hybrid OR solutions and innovating surgical navigation technology, which helps surgeons perform image-guided, open and minimally invasive spine surgery. When performing delicate tasks in spine procedures, accuracy is paramount to achieving the best outcome for patients. The integration between ClarifEye and Philips Image Guided Therapy System – Azurion – offers key benefits such as intraoperative cone-beam CT scanning with superb image quality at managed doses, 3D spine model based planning for each pedicle, live augmented reality guidance and intraoperative verification. It enables physicians to focus on the patient and procedures while improving the surgical workflow, differentiating it from more conventional surgical navigation methods.