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Welcome to this week, health my name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week Health. A set of channels dedicated to keeping health IT staff current and engaged. Today we have an interview in action from the 2023 Spring conferences, vibe in Nashville and hymns in Chicago.

Special thanks to our cDW, Rubrik, Sectra and Trellix for choosing to invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders.

You can check them out on our website this week, health.com, now onto this interview.

 All right, here we are from HIMSS 2023, and we're doing another interview in action. Here in Chicago, we're joined by Fredrik Gustafsson. Am I close?

Perfectly fine. Thank you so much. Go ahead and correct me. Gustafsson, but that's...

Thank you. You're doing good. No, I appreciate it. And you're with Sectra.

I am. And I'm looking forward to this conversation. One of the things I like about Sectra is I think you're one of the leaders in, what I'm calling the, digitization of, of all the imaging that's going on. Sure. Sort of one of the, the advanced companies. As you come to this, I mean, we have Boost behind us, Boost in front of us what are you seeing in the industry?

What's going on?

Well, so what we're certainly hearing from our customers is like, the challenge they're facing, you know, more to do, pressure, financial pressure, as we're certainly seeing them struggling with the ability to manage all of that. Digitization. And something that's really happening now is also they're digitizing pathology.

And the ability to actually start doing that is something that we're, seeing a lot of customers here in the U. S. right now looking for. And on an international basis.

Well, you, you started with financial pressure and then you went to digital pathology. Is there an ROI on digital pathology?

For sure.

For sure. And we've been seeing a lot of customers now, you're slightly slower in the U. S. due to some regulatory perspectives now. So adoption of this was, was. And we were seeing this for many years now in the European markets that it greatly transforms the ability to deliver. And I mean, one of the things, if you think about it, we're seeing in radiology the shift to reading from home.

How do you do that in pathology? You know,

We're also, we're also seeing a shift in reading by machines.

Oh yeah. So we're combining, from our perspective at Sectra, we're combining the ability to provide a digital experience combined with AI. But we do believe that you still need a human in the loop and human plus machine is certainly going to be the best.

So talk to me about digital pathology. So, who did I interview on that? I think it was Jamie Nelson, hospital for special surgery out of New York. Right. And she was talking about just the, the, the benefit from a clinician experience standpoint. Sure. And, and whatnot. Talk about the implementation of this.

I mean, how, how much of a lift is it for a health system to do digital pathology?

So if we take HSS, for example. Which is a great example, by the way, that we're running sector and they expanded into digital pathology. Now, what, what I think they're saying in this case, it's, it's actually utilizing the same platform, and I think this is really sort of playing into the enterprise imaging platform concept idea and the whole idea to be able to leverage a platform into healthcare, managing many different ologies.

And so the lift isn't that big, and that's the, that's the beauty. Utilize the same consistent sort of, the same technology, same, capabilities of our solutions. And so I think what they've seen at HSS, I think the ability to work with both radiology pathology in the same system that's something we're calling integrated diagnostics.

So the ability to start making decisions with a combination of information from different fields, especially in tumor cases like cancer cases. So the ability to do effective tumor boards, the ability to work with that in one solution is, is transformational.

What's the catalyst for a health system to start thinking about a shift from their existing.

Imaging systems to a different system like Sectra? I mean, because that's a big lift.

Yeah. Well, well I think, I think we've certainly seen a number of cases where we've been able to do lift from an existing on-prem solution to like a full implemented sector solution within less than a half year. So we are certainly seeing technology or you're sort of making the US able to move a lot of data quickly and transform, ingest that and actually get them operational.

And so I would argue from a technology point of view, we're certainly getting to a point where, we can very, very quickly take customers to a, a better future.

So that's the movement of data and whatnot. I mean, I guess the thing that takes six months is you have to redo some workflows. You have to redo the training

and all that.

So, I mean, that's now what we're seeing on that space is that we're trying to bring more of our best practice into the field. So we're helping customers leverage other customers experiences, making sure that they are able to then benefit from that. But, but if you're going to do it fast, yeah. And yeah, then you need to sort of, you know,

Is there a way to step into it.

Is there a way to look at it go like eventually we're going to, we're going to go to a new digital platform for imaging and we're going to start with, and which one would they start with would they start with radiology, cardiology?

Well, I, I think maybe where do you have pain? Right. We've certainly seen customers , that have had huge issues with ophthalmology and so we started working with them and saying, well, you know, we're, we're going to support you on this one.

And again, with the ability to then build into a much more wider utilization at the later stage, leveraging, you know, and then One of the benefits if you're building a platform is like you're integrated with your EMRs you're building your sort of reliance, availability, resilience, and you're investing that into one platform that you can benefit in many other ologies.

So you can certainly start with digital pathology, ophthalmology, radiology, and then build into other ologies.

📍     📍 We'll get back to our show in just a minute. I am excited about our webinars this year. They have been going very well. What I've done is I've gone out and talked to people in the community and said, what works in webinars?

And they came back and said, look, this is what we want. We want a webinar that is not product centric. It's really focused in on the problems of health care. And we want people on there that are actually solving those problems. And so we have done that. And the response has been fantastic this year. We have another webinar coming up.

It is the future of care spaces. Where care is being delivered is changing rapidly. Even the care spaces within the hospital themselves are changing. Technology is being added in different types of technology. A. I obviously computer vision and whatnot is changing that modality as well as what's going on in the home and whatnot.

So we're gonna have that webinar June 8th at one p. m. Easter time. We usually have it on the first Thursday. Happens to be a little too close to my anniversary. So we're going to do June 8th at 1 p. m. Eastern time future of care spaces. We would love to have you be a part of it. If you are interested in being there, go ahead and hit our website.

Top right hand corner. We have a card. You can click on that card and go ahead and fill out the form and get registered today. We would love to have you join us we look forward to seeing you there. Now back to our show.

📍  

It's interesting, when we used to talk about this, when you talk about platforms, I think about cloud. When I think about cloud, when I came in in 2012, we used to say, people would say, you know, you take most of the stuff to the cloud, but you'll never take imaging to the cloud, but we've gotten beyond that.

Wasn't that wrong, right? No. So we actually, we've been doing cloud for more than eight years. And so we're running a full cloud native solution and you're definitely able to deliver full imaging, including digital pathology, which by the way, generates more than 10 times the data for radiology. And we do that today already across like a multitude of different ologies and the different countries.

Okay. And by the way, for the record, you did not really bring up AI. I, I'm the one who's bringing it up because almost every interview ends up at an AI conversation. but I want to take it there because in the imaging space, one of the spaces where people have said, look, this is one of the areas where AI can really step in and really support, really help.

What are some of the obstacles in terms of really integrating AI into the everyday workflow of the.

That's a great question, and one that we've been pondering quite a bit, and what we decided with the onset when we started seeing the trends towards AI and sort of the ability to read images by machine, basically, was that it's really going to be the crucial question is how do we make sure that the end users are still in control, what's the experience going to be like?

Otherwise, we will not have adoption of that technology. So we started really looking at that closely, we started designing how our end user experience should be. We built a marketplace. We built the vehicles for end customers to actually experience and use AI. And so we're seeing great adoption right now of customers adopting what's called amplifier in the sector world, which is our cloud based platform to get access to different algorithms.

And so we're seeing some very interesting use cases for breast screening, whether canceling the second read based on scoring out of algorithms. So I think we're definitely seeing this taking off now. It's been a lot of talk

for many years. So there will be some ROI out of,

I'm sure we'll see that.

It's interesting.

It's, the cardiologists, radiologists, whatnot, they're, they're not averse to AI models and because , they know it's not going to replace them. It's essentially going to be something that augments them and says, Hey, look at this, look at this, look at this. And it makes the read quicker and draws their attention to something that potentially to do doing a lot of reads.

They're not going to say.

Absolutely. Totally agree. I think, I think it's about augmenting their experience.

So how is this conference? So this is. How is this different than the large imaging conference that will happen in Chicago later this year?

compared other sort of imaging centric conferences, I think what we're seeing here is much more the focus of a wider set of imagingologies.

Again, we might be seeing a lot of focus on radiology specifically. Here we're seeing much more of the CIOs and, the IT departments looking at how can we consolidate. And so we have a lot of customers looking for these platforms. EMRs. It's the way to, to, to actually do that. Yeah, I think, we think that's a pretty fun, fun way to describe it.

And that's what we're thinking it, the future is going to be like. We're taking care of pixels and we're integrating that tightly with, with

EMRs. That's fantastic. Frederick, I want to thank you for your time. Thank

you so much.

Appreciate it.

Another great interview. I wanna thank everybody who spent time with us at the conference. I love hearing from people on the front lines and it's phenomenal that they've taken the time to share their wisdom and experience with the community. It is greatly appreciated.

We wanna thank our partners, CDW, Rubrik, Sectra and Trellix, who invest in our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. Thanks for listening. That's all for now