The Medical University of South Carolina and Siemens Healthineers have forged a partnership to disrupt and reshape healthcare delivery.
The partnership will use MUSC’s clinical care, research and education expertise with Siemens Healthineers’s engineering innovations and workflow-improvement capabilities.
“We are leveraging a longstanding relationship to reshape what we can both deliver in healthcare,” David J. Cole, MUSC’s president, said in a press release. “Our nation is demanding that we address our fractured, costly and inefficient healthcare delivery systems. As the leading academic health sciences center in this state, MUSC’s purpose must be to drive the highest quality care for our patients at the lowest cost through commitment and partnerships. In discussions with the Siemens Healthineers team, we discovered a high degree of alignment with these concepts, and we are very excited to have them move forward with us. Our mutual goal is to not merely provide the best care possible for just our patients; we will define the new gold standard for others to follow.”
Through the agreement MUSC will improve performance while creating clinical and value-driven innovations in areas such as pediatrics, cardiovascular care, radiology and neurosciences.
“Ultimately, our goal is to enable healthcare providers to get better outcomes at lower cost. We will achieve that by empowering MUSC clinicians on this journey through four specific areas of focus-expanding precision medicine, transforming care delivery, improving the patient experience and digitalizing healthcare,” Dave Pacitti, president of North America for Siemens Healthineers, said. “These four core values of Siemens Healthineers are representative of the goals of our strategic relationship with MUSC, and we hope that the spirit of this flagship partnership will initiate a trend in value-based care within the industry.”
MUSC and Siemens plan to reduce the amount of time it takes for severe stroke patients to get treatment. The partnership hopes to set new industry-wide standards and increase the amount of good outcomes for patients after having a stroke.
“South Carolina sits within our nation’s stroke belt, and by combining a world-class stroke program with the incredible power of Siemens Healthineers, we expect to achieve a level of excellence in stroke care that has never been routinely achieved in everyday practice,” Patrick Cawley, MUSC Health CEO and VP for health affairs, said. “The faster that we can get patients suffering from a stroke into treatment, the more likely a patient can return to a productive and healthy life. It’s ambitious, but it’s necessary if we want to achieve that alignment of increased efficiency, cost-effectiveness and the highest quality of severe stroke care.”
The collaboration will also improve digital twin technology application. Digital twin technology is a type of artificial intelligence that is a digital replica of a physical asset, process or system. Digital twin has been used to optimize patient and family experience while maximizing efficiency at MUSC’s Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital and Pearl Tourville Women’s Pavilion. The system helps planning teams determine the impact of expensive changes and test them in the real world to predict how different workflow solutions or health innovations would work in a new facility.
“This partnership creates an unprecedented opportunity for MUSC students to share and learn from individuals they would otherwise not have access to in a more traditional educational setting,” Lisa Saladin, MUSC executive VP for academic affairs and provost, said. “I anticipate that our students will share and engage with healthcare data and informatics in new ways, be exposed to cutting-edge technologies designed to improve quality of patient care and provider work flows and participate in research endeavors they never would have thought possible. This strategic partnership will better prepare them for the future of health practice.”
MUSC and Siemens Healthineers have created partnerships in the past for promoting the development and use of speciality healthcare equipment in clinical and laboratory settings. The new one will process the relationship by pooling resources to promote clinical innovation, research-driving development and education.
“The partnership with MUSC is globally unique for Siemens Healthineers and a bold move for writing a new chapter for healthcare in the 21st century. Like no other company, we can help transform care delivery in everyday clinical practice with our innovative products and extensive experience in automation and digitalization and bring added value to heal care providers as well as patients,” Bernd Montag, CEO of Siemens Healthineers, said. “This cooperation is a blueprint for the future trend in value-based care: taking a holistic view of the care pathway from prevention to diagnosis, therapy and follow-ups.”
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