Siemens Healthcare Day aimed at improving nation’s health

Can you give a brief introduction about Siemens healthcare Vietnam?

Siemens Healthcare Sector was established in Vietnam in 1993. Over more than two decades, we have provided a broad spectrum of imaging and laboratory diagnostics systems and solutions to numerous hospitals and clinics throughout the country.

Siemens offers our customers products and solutions for the entire range of patient care, from prevention and early detection to diagnosis, treatment and aftercare. By helping to optimise clinical workflows for the most common diseases, we also make healthcare faster, better and more cost-effective.

We are the number one supplier of diagnostics solutions in the Vietnamese market, combining the strengths of both In Vitro and Imaging diagnostics.

What is your view of Vietnam’s healthcare industry?

Vietnam’s healthcare industry has been developing very fast and the trend will continue. There are more and more hospitals and clinics being equipped with state-of-the-art technology which support early detection of threatening diseases and enables doctors to provide more timely and accurate diagnosis and treatment, thus saving hundreds of thousands of lives each year. The demand for high quality patient care services is on the rise.

There will be more five-star hospitals in Vietnam like Vinmec in the future and Vietnamese people won’t have to travel to neighbouring countries like Singapore or Thailand to receive world-class healthcare services at a very high cost.

The Vietnamese government also supports the industry’s development with no import tariffs on medical equipment.

However, Vietnam’s healthcare industry is facing many big challenges such as its fast growing population, increasing chronic diseases, overloaded infrastructure and lack of qualified medical staff, and funding shortages in particular. Increasing population means increasing demand for healthcare services and pressure on infrastructure. Increasing chronic diseases means more complex and costly treatments. And yet, most hospitals in Vietnam are currently subsidised by the government, which has a limited budget.

So what can Siemens do to help Vietnam tackle these challenges?

We can provide our support according to three pillars - innovation, service and education and knowledge transfer.

Regarding innovation, we aim to provide Vietnamese healthcare providers with the most innovative medical technologies to properly screen, diagnose, and treat patients. This means the most advanced applications being used in leading hospitals, teaching and research centres, and also cost-efficient and high-quality solutions for routine clinical applications in smaller institutions.

As for service, this is of utmost importance as all of our systems need to be properly maintained to limit downtime and keep performance at the highest level. For some patients, availability of equipment is a question of life or death. For investors, it’s a question of getting the most out of their investment. We invest heavily in people and technical training and we are expanding our global state-of-the-art service processes in Vietnam. Our service team was awarded The Best Service Team Award in ASEAN.

Vis à vis education and knowledge transfer; we as a company feel responsible for doing our part in bringing incremental knowledge to the healthcare community: knowledge to the ‘users’ with intensive application and technical training, in order to make sure our technology is used to its full potential. We have organised many clinical workshops and symposiums like Down Syndrome Screening, Women’s Health or Oncology where we invite high-profile speakers from all over the world, as well as Siemens’ senior experts from our headquarters. Regarding technical training, we have co-operated with the Vietnamese Ministry of Health to organise a series of workshops for service engineers and technicians working in hospitals throughout the country.

As you mentioned, a limited budget is always a big problem for both the public and private sectors, how can Siemens help address this?

We understand very well this issue because it’s common everywhere around the globe, and luckily we already have a solution. At Siemens, our definition of innovation is broader than only high-end innovation. We pursue a two-pronged strategy in this field. On the one side we drive innovation in the high-end to help science institutes and teaching hospitals drive research to fight the most threatening diseases like cancer. On the other side, we simultaneously work on making high quality medical equipment available at affordable prices so that more people can benefit from it, also with middle and entry-level hospitals and clinics.

We have products and solutions suitable and affordable to all market segments ranging from cutting-edge technology solutions for leading medical and academic institutes - for example the Siemens syngo.plaza PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System), which we installed at Cho Ray Hospital in Ho Chi Minh City last year - to a wide range of diagnostic and therapy solutions for medium to large-sized urban, community health systems such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and down to basic healthcare solutions for provincial and district hospitals such as ultrasound, X-ray units and so on.

We also strongly support the public-private partnership (PPP) model in healthcare projects.

Siemens has been established as number one supplier of imaging systems in Vietnam’s market for many years. What about In Vitro Diagnostics? How do you see the development trend of this newer, yet highly potential division?

Our laboratory diagnostics (DX) organisation in Vietnam was established 3 years ago. Despite being relatively young in Vietnam, our global DX teams have been in the business with renowned products and solutions for many years, making Siemens a leader globally. With this legacy the division in Vietnam has made excellent achievements in a short period, in terms of both business performance and personnel.

They have managed to win a number of important contracts such as the supply of the first Siemens Aptio™ Automation platform in Vietnam at the Medic Centre in Ho Chi Minh City in September 2013.This was also the first installation of its kind in the ASEAN region. It represents Siemens’ latest innovation and vision for how we can help laboratories by combining workflow excellence with clinical excellence. It allows our customers to have access to the newest assays while managing the laboratory effectively and intelligently.

The team itself has been expanding rapidly to now having large scale operations, and we will continue to invest in people and training.

I’m very positive about the development of the DX business in Vietnam because currently most hospitals and clinics are extremely overloaded with hundreds of thousands of tests per day, whereas the testing systems often work slowly and are wearing down. More than ever, Vietnamese hospitals and clinics need faster and stronger systems like Siemens Aptio and Versacell automation while Vietnamese patients desperately need to say goodbye to the long queues and endless wait times for results.

Siemens Healthcare Day was held for the second time in Ho Chi Minh City last week. Can you share the key message of this year’s event?

The theme of our first Siemens Healthcare Day, which took place in Ho Chi Minh City in 2012, was: “A happier world begins with a healthier world”. At this event, we provided customers with the latest updates on Vitamin D testing and liver disease detection and treatment with non-invasive methods.

This year, we are focused on Quality, Confidence and Excellence. Quality means assuring top-notch lab diagnostics for our customers and their laboratories. Confidence means building trust in our technology and our solutions, giving customers certainty in our ability to partner with labs to deliver accurate test results. Excellence means creating the ultimate level of clinical excellence and workflow efficiency.

We wish to accompany our customers on a journey for quality diagnostic testing to create confidence in our common goal of delivering quality patient care with answers – answers that have the potential to change lives and in doing so, achieving excellence together in the world of laboratory diagnostics.