Winfried Post, General Manager and Managing Director Dedalus HealthCare DACH in the DMEA Gold Partner Interview

The German market leader for clinical information systems continues to expand its portfolio and, along with information systems, is focusing increasingly on knowledge-based solutions for clinicians and hospital management. According to Winfried Post, General Manager and CEO of Dedalus HealthCare DACH, highlights at the DMEA 2022 include a new development in medication management , supported by a recent business acquisition, and portal solutions that enable its customers, the hospitals, to offer improved services for patients and out-patient care.

Following a two-year hiatus due to the pandemic, your company is returning as a Gold Partner to the DMEA 2022, which will, it is hoped, be taking place in a physical form. What has been happening over the past two years?

Following the takeover by Dedalus, the DMEA 2022 actually offers us the first opportunity to stage a public presentation on a wider scale. For this reason alone we are eagerly awaiting April. Obviously the coronavirus crisis had a severe effect on us, resulting in many changes. We have learned how to more or less execute entire projects through home-working . This has applied not just to training and interface configuration, which have always been possible, but also to genuinely complex implementation projects. In sales and distribution too we now operate with completely different formats, both internally and externally. Now, when we stage customer presentations online, we can reach not just one but as many as 150 customers. Although this approach is not quite as, it nevertheless offers many advantages.

How has the company developed following the takeover?

Following the takeover by Dedalus on 4 May 2020 our development has been very successful and has exceeded expectations. There has been enormous growth, especially in our workforce. Dedalus HealthCare currently employs 6,700 people around the world, and this figure is still rapidly increasing. Our service sector alone in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (DACH) now employs one hundred people and the best thing is that we continue to find staff. Moreover, within a year we have taken over five outstanding companies in the DACH region alone. Internationally they have been joined by the health IT division of DXC Technology (including Lorenzo HIS), and more takeovers are on the way. Dedalus is making major investments in order to boost growth and provide our customers with the best possible IT products.

What form will the presentation by Dedalus take at the DMEA?

We have not just one but three stands there. This is also a consequence of the takeover that I referred to. In addition to our main stand we also have two smaller stands directly adjacent to it. One of them features Dedalus Labor. Within this area we took over the German market leader OSM AG as of 30 June 2021, as well as the laboratory communication platform specialist ixmid on 14 December 2021. On the second “small” stand we are presenting our medication specialist Dosing, which we acquired in May 2021. As far as the display on the main stand is concerned, due to coronavirus we have dispensed this year with individual presentation workplaces and will be using very large monitors to show our solutions, in particular ORBIS U, to groups of customers and other interested persons. In this way the rules on distancing can be effectively complied with. And with reference to takeovers, we can also provide very up-to-date reports about the acquisition of the medical controlling specialist GSG GmbH. The gap that had previously existed in this area has now been entirely filled.

As Dedalus, and earlier as Agfa, you have always covered a wide scope. The takeovers have expanded the portfolio even more. What would you particularly draw attention to at the DMEA?

Let us begin with our new HIS ORBIS U and the care process, both of which will be major topics. We have applied all the relevant nursing functions to our web-based platform ORBIS U, using HTML-5, which means that hospitals can display the entire care process both in an in-patient and a mobile context. It is supplemented by the ORBIS Info4U app, which makes the complete patient file, including the latest findings, available to clinical personnel at any time as a way of rapidly accessing data in the workplace. Another highlight comes as a result of the aforementioned takeover of Dosing: we are presenting the latest version of our medication managements ORBIS Medication, where we have already made great strides with the integration of dosing functions The aim is the achieve the complete integration of the dosing engine in ORBIS. This gives our customers easy-to-use checks on contraindications and interactions, information about medications and dosing functions. From a company perspective it is particularly interesting that Dosing represents the transition from simply supplying IT to becoming a content supplier. The functions are now so advanced and the expertise that backs them up is so extensive that the use of ORBIS Medication enables our customers to vastly improve the safety of the medication process.

This year the Hospital Future Law is a very topical issue. What is the situation regarding patient-oriented solutions, as shown for example in Funding Objective 2? What can be seen at the DMEA in this respect?

This is also very much one of our main topics at the DMEA. Using our range of portals our customers are increasingly turning their attention directly to the patients. In terms of the patient portal our Patient XCare Suite represents a brand new solution and one that is much more effective than its predecessors. This is closely linked with patient discharge management, where we have adopted most of Care-Bridge GmbH from Asklepios. Care-Bridge provides a highly innovative, cloud-based discharge management portal. This also not only involves infrastructure but additionally, and to a significant extent, content. The eventual aim is the digital display of evidence-based patient paths on the hospital’s discharge interfaces. There is a great demand for this, and the Care-Bridge solution has already been rolled out in fifty clinics. Used together with our brand new patient portal Patient XCare Suite, we are now able to display the funding objective 2 of the KHZG to perfection.

Briefly, what new developments can visitors to the DMEA expect to find in the areas of analytics and PACS?

The clinics contain enormous “data lakes“, from which very useful insights can be obtained by means of intelligent algorithms: new medical applications that significantly improve care are now possible.. This is the new clinical analytics, and our AI product goes by the name of clinalytix. Examples of two use cases that we have implemented are Delir and Sepsis, but this is certainly just the beginning. It involves artificial intelligence (AI) processes, as well as NLP/NLU approaches, where we are making massive investments. As a result we have access to our own AI approaches, which will be used in many areas in future: in clinical analytics, medical controlling, diagnostics and also, for example, in the management of care processes. Briefly, in conclusion, a few words on the subject of PACS, for which we have taken over Dobco Medical Systems from Belgium. Dobco adds its forward-looking state-of-the-art cloud PACS technology to our leading diagnostics IT portfolio, which is of particular interest to all clinical radiology units and radiology practices. The cloud – this is indubitably the future for almost all health IT applications.