Making hospital IT more intelligent – and supporting care

There is no need for modern hospital IT systems to be purely web-based, standardised and modular. More and more, they are incorporating AI with the aim of making life easier for both hospital staff and management. Winfried Post, general manager and CEO of Dedalus HealthCare DACH, reveals what Germany’s leading provider of hospital information systems (HIS) has in store at DMEA 2024 regarding AI and beyond – and other potential opportunities in the future.

How intelligent are Dedalus solutions, specifically the ORBIS hospital information system (HIS)?

Regarding the incorporation of AI, we are talking primarily about ORBIS U, our latest-generation HIS, which is indeed becoming more and more intelligent. We are very proud of the progress our offspring has made. They concern a wide range of applications. Regarding the hospital sector, at DMEA we are showing an application that helps track the history of sores, which not only documents images but also automatically takes measurements and produces analyses. We also have several tools for predictive analysis of sepsis, delirium and kidney failure. That is very important. Clinalytics is an approved medical product because its information results in direct medical consequences. Last year we made significant progress in this field, one that will become increasingly important. I am certain of that.

Where do you stand on using AI with coding?

Regarding medical controlling, we have an exciting partnership in AI technology with the Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS). Our product is called RICO, an acronym for Right Coding. RICO assists coding specialists and those in medical controlling with coding patient diagnoses and procedures with the help of text mining. Apart from using a set of around 120,000 rules, we also employ natural language processing (NLP) which involves the use of AI algorithms in its stricter sense. We are also thinking about using AI for medical reports. The focus here is not on coding but on creating medical reports that the average patient can understand, which is also important.

Are you also using AI with speech recognition? The impression one gets is that hospital staff increasingly want speech recognition software.

That is possibly one of the most fascinating fields. With ORBIS HIS, we are presenting the automatic documentation of a doctor/patient conversation with AI at DMEA, a genuine innovation on the German market. It can be used to digitally extract information from a conversation about anamnesis, and will probably make most hospital documentation much easier. This is a first in Germany as far as we are aware. We are keen to see how it will be received. We are also showing a new ChatBot which answers questions from medical staff about individual patients, about their medication, discharge or appointments for example. We are interested to see how that will be received.

Dedalus is strongly represented again at DMEA – on multiple stands.

The focus is on our main stand where we are showing many of the things we have already talked about, including the entire ORBIS U range. On the stand we are also occupying a large stage which will feature a whole range of fascinating lectures by employees and customers alike. That is something we did last year for the first time and there was an overwhelmingly positive feedback. Next to our main stand we are hosting our own diagnostics stand, which will be showing our radiology solutions (ORBIS RIS, DeepUnity PACS, DeepUnity eVNA) and cardiology solutions as well as the Dedalus range of laboratory products. And then there is a stand for Dosing, the AMTS specialist we took over in 2020. In our view, digital medication solutions will be a primary field for innovation in the Germany digital health sector in the years to come. Policymakers also share this view.

In addition to AI and analytical tools, billing is another key topic for Dedalus at DMEA. Why has it suddenly become a hot topic again?

For two reasons. On the one hand, following the discontinuation of SAP IS-H, a widely used billing software, many hospitals are urgently in need of alternative, efficient billing solutions. On the other hand, Germany’s hospital reform means that billing in the inpatient sector will drastically change. Hospitals need to respond in terms of how they are organised, and IT solutions must be optimised accordingly. At Dedalus we are ideally equipped to face these challenges, because a few years ago we designed our own billing software which covers the entire range of needs of hospitals of every size, including university hospitals in Germany, and soon in Austria too. There is a significant and urgent demand for information right now. At DMEA we are hosting a dedicated presentation room for this purpose, where we can also receive larger groups.