In the Rapid Advancements in Oncology Treatments, How Can Healthcare IT Support Clinicians? (Elekta)

[00:00:00] Dear listeners, welcome to Faces of Digital Health, a podcast about digital health and

[00:00:06] how healthcare systems around the world adopt technology with me, Tiaja Zeitz.

[00:00:17] The field of oncology treatments is advancing very fast with innovative therapies and approaches

[00:00:22] on the market every day. since Elekta is a global company. Enjoy the show and if you haven't yet, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and also check we make for traditional radiation therapy, like linear accelerators. But we also lead in the neurosurgery space with actually work with other vendors? How would you describe the market from that perspective? So I think I'll give a maybe a little bit of a longer answer, right? The US market is definitely a developed market, a saturated market, and mostly renewables that we have here. As opposed to international, we are seeing tremendous growth in China, India, Indonesia,

[00:04:23] where the economies are taking off.

[00:04:25] Cancer care, which is a burden

[00:04:26] in all of these state by state challenge.

[00:05:43] And especially in healthcare IT, I'm wondering what's your perspective? the best care, but also at the same time keeping the costs of care into account. And their focus is managing productivity for the most part. They're not operating at very high margins. They're really looking at productivity, managing local populations. They're also spread out across the length and breadth of the country, really focused in rural communities as well and so on.

[00:07:01] So very different set up for those.

[00:07:03] And then there are specialty care like oncology that you always

[00:07:06] have some freestanding clinics.

[00:08:03] oncology and then if it is in one therapeutic area who are you targeting? Are you going after the community clinics?

[00:08:05] Are you going after the freestanding clinics?

[00:08:07] Are you really wanting to go after the key opinion leaders where you are really cutting edge?

[00:08:12] Your technology is coming out of a cutting edge research from someplace and you want to start there.

[00:08:17] So you have to really take these parameters into account.

[00:08:20] Fortunately for us Electa serves all of these markets.

[00:08:22] We've been around for a long time.

[00:08:24] We've celebrated 50 years of our sometimes these two things are in conflict. Inherently as you try to personalize the care for every patient, personalize the treatment that you want to give to every patient, it can be more expensive and it can also take longer which means it can lead to lesser productivity.

[00:09:41] So these two things sometimes are in conflict and companies are always trying to balance

[00:09:45] it.

[00:09:46] So I think the opportunity, especially with the advancement of AI and Gen AI boom that has happened in 2023. How has that impacted you? Are you in the experimentation phase with the technology? Did you already include anything in your products? So we've already been including a lot in terms of AI in our products traditionally. We have products that help with planning of treatments

[00:11:01] for radiation treatment.

[00:11:02] We have products that deliver both medical

[00:11:06] and radiation oncology.

[00:11:07] We have patient engagement solutions And that's a step closer. So we are really focused on innovation like that. We talk a lot about patient feedback, patient inclusion, personalized medicine. And since you mentioned all the things that you are doing on that end, so from patient reported outcomes, from apps that support patients in that care.

[00:12:21] Can you maybe explain a little bit how, I need to come and see you every day. Now, in some cases, this side effect may be expected, and you can set that expectation with the patient. And in some cases, this side effect could be a symptom of something severe that will need medical intervention. Only the doctors know it because they know what treatment they're putting the patient on, what are acceptable levels of these symptoms, and what

[00:13:44] are not, right? So when we look at our patient reported outcome on the AIB having saying okay this is something you need to call the patient in this is something you can tell the patient it's okay and so on so it becomes a very important factor in keeping the patient at ease during the treatment intervening when it's really required and otherwise telling the patient it's okay you're on a normal treatment cycle you

[00:15:02] can come back next week as planned and so on is not reflected there, it's going to be missed. Clinicians are super busy, they don't have the time or the resources to look at 20 things all at once. So that integration is key and that's what we've done with Electa1. How do you see that the whole field is developing?

[00:16:21] What's the most difficult thing for you in software development? willingness to adopt newer technologies in healthcare IT, in the cloud, is improving. We can see a lot of adoption of cloud technologies inside the hospitals. So I think the movement away from legacy software is already happening. If you look at travel, you go to Google Flights, you book your travel. All the servers in the backend, they're still the legacy servers, right?

[00:17:40] They are of course getting modernized, but that's happening over time.

[00:17:44] But for you as a user, the user experience to look at this, right? One is to say relentless prioritization of what you need to take forward with and what can be let go and repackage it and deliver in a different way. Second is to say the adoption of cloud and

[00:19:01] new technologies that you can deliver in the I think the hardest thing sometimes is standardization. When you are such a global company, you have so many deployments across the world,

[00:20:23] you have to make sure that you are doing things that can scale globally.

[00:20:25] And sometimes there's so much noise from certain places is so different and then deploying resources to manage all of that. It's a challenge for every global company in the healthcare icon space. And you new level. And we are also fulfilling our obligations for e-prescribing in international markets. So if you ask me specifically the number of systems

[00:23:02] we connect, it's such a large number and it keeps changing.

[00:23:05] Anybody who plays in this open ecosystem game do you see that the market is going to develop further? What are your future expectations in terms of technology and how it will support treatments? I think that's a fantastic question and then it's also a sobering one. Like we see it as people live longer, as other improvements of life come in, the

[00:24:21] incidence of cancer is very high but it's also increasing. We see that, right? But as you see advancements in immunotherapy and radiopharma, I think these fields will come more and more together and deliver better treatment for our patients. Is there anything that you are specifically looking forward to in terms of technology development in healthcare? And it can go beyond just oncology.

[00:25:42] In your past, you've worked for various genome, as we learn there was recently a publication from Cambridge in the UK in partnership with DeepMind from Google that they've mapped the whole human proteome, meaning all the proteins in the human body. The human genome has already been mapped.

[00:27:00] So as we get more and more understanding of using them. I think how accurate these will be. Will they work 90% of the time or 99% of the time and should we deploy them into actual medical practice. What's that

[00:28:24] right threshold of accuracy and when is human intervention required think it's a very important topic that also needs collaboration between different regulatory agencies, between the industry and economic institutions to come to an agreement as to what is safe and what's good and so on. You've been listening to Faces of Digital Health, a proud member of the Health Podcast

[00:29:41] Network.

[00:29:42] If you enjoyed the show, do leave a rating or a review wherever you get your podcast.