MUSC and Siemens Healthineers form strategic partnership to reshape healthcare delivery
The Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) and Siemens Healthineers have formed a first-of-its-kind strategic partnership with the mutual goal of advancing the quality of healthcare in South Carolina. The partnership will capitalize on the coupling of MUSC’s clinical care, research and education expertise with Siemens Healthineers’ engineering innovations and workflow-improvement capabilities.
“We are leveraging a longstanding relationship to reshape what we can both deliver in healthcare,” said David J. Cole, M.D., MUSC president. “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.”
Specifically, this new agreement will focus on driving performance excellence at MUSC and generating significant clinical and value-driven innovations in focused target areas including 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,” said Dave Pacitti, president of North America for Siemens Healthineers. “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.”
For example, MUSC and Siemens team members plan to drastically reduce the time it takes for severe stroke patients to receive treatment. The US national standard for stroke care sets the goal at less than a 90-minute average from entry to the hospital to the start of the surgery to open a blocked blood vessel. While MUSC currently provides care for severe stroke patients well below that marker, this partnership creates an opportunity to do even more, with the aim of setting new industry-wide standards and increasing the number and variety of good outcomes for patients post-stroke.
Another example of enhanced collaboration related to the new strategic partnership is the enhanced application of “digital twin technology.” A kind of artificial intelligence, a digital twin is a digital replica of a physical asset, process, or system. A digital twin has been deployed to optimize the patient and family experience and maximize efficiency at the MUSC Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital and Pearl Tourville Women’s Pavilion, a new facility currently under construction on the Charleston peninsula. This digital replica enables planning teams to quickly determine the impact of changes that would be costly, if not impossible, to test in the real world, and helps them forecast how well possible workflow solutions or health innovations may actually work in that new facility.
woolwinh@musc.edu
www.siemens-healthineers.com
