“While certain factors, both economic and political, clearly influence short-term performance I am fundamentally confident of the success chances of our Healthcare business in the long run.” Mr. Rusckowski commented. “Our world is facing some inescapable challenges in the medium-to-long term. We have come a long way already in building up the Healthcare portfolio needed to face those challenges. This, coupled with our leading business positions and our differentiating approach in general, positions us well for the future, despite the short-term headwind we face today.”

During today’s meeting, several Healthcare executives will discuss the fundamental drivers and positioning of their respective businesses. For instance, the chief executive of Home Healthcare Solutions will discuss how ever-more pressing challenges like overburdened healthcare systems and ageing populations will lead to out-of-hospital medical treatment and patient monitoring becoming an increasingly important element in the Healthcare mix. He will elaborate on how Philips is excellently positioned to benefit from this trend, while providing sensible solutions to some of the key healthcare challenges of our time.

Other executives will cover a range of relevant topics, including progress made in building out the business in key emerging economies such as China, India and Latin America by making strategic acquisitions, expanding service businesses and extending the product offering. There will also be a session dedicated to Philips’ holistic care-cycle approach to Healthcare and how it gives the business a strong competitive edge. Steve Rusckowski will also discuss how, despite some short-term negative trends, the fundamentals of the business remain strong.

During the day, analysts will also be given more insight into Philips Healthcare’s efforts to tackle the short-term impact of the current economic slowdown through a strong focus on cost and cash management and ensuring that maximum value is captured from recent acquisitions. Philips will also provide an update on restructuring and cost reduction measures for Healthcare, which are now expected to result in total savings of EUR 150 million for 2009.

See also:

• New Intel Software Connects Health Networks, Enabling Key Data Sharing in Clinical Settings (0)

Until now, the sharing of patient information among healthcare network participants has been hindered by the steep costs and complexities of proprietary data and integration services. Based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Intel SOA Expressway for Healthcare offers a cost-efficient solution to this problem by providing an efficient and scaleable way to translate, process and connect any data format across a healthcare network.

In addition, Intel has created a group of validated independent software vendors (ISVs) that provides best-of-breed capabilities to deploy a complete health network powered by the Intel SOA Expressway. Current validated ecosystem vendors include Apelon, Infotech Global (IGI), Initiate Systems, Oracle and Red Hat. Services provided by these vendors include controlled medical vocabulary translation, clinical patient portal applications, enterprise master patient index, clinical data repository and operating system support. The validated ecosystem helps complete next-generation SOA architecture for healthcare data interoperability.

The software solution has been successfully piloted with several healthcare providers, including at a hospital network in Shanghai. “Intel SOA Expressway for Healthcare solved a very difficult hospital integration scenario for us,” said Shen Ping, general manager of Health Services Division at Wonders Information Co, the systems integrator deploying the Shanghai health network. “We were surprised to see that it was able to meet our performance requirements for daily synchronization of nearly a million hospital records in a short amount of time.”

Intel SOA Expressway for Healthcare provides the performance of a hardware appliance in a software form factor that offers native message acceleration for rapid data exchange, workflow management and translation to enable data exchange to and from any original format. This advance in software is an example of how technology can help improve patient care and reduce healthcare costs by streamlining information flow.

“Intel has developed the SOA Expressway for Healthcare as a platform that can be used with a wide variety of existing IT environments to provide world-class integration regardless of the specific electronic medical records and other software platforms used at individual healthcare facilities,” said Renee James, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Software and Solutions Group. “We also leveraged the SOA architecture to drive down costs, which has enabled Intel to offer our solution at prices comparable or below other solutions in the market.”

In order to make Intel SOA Expressway for Healthcare as versatile as possible, Intel designed it as a flexible product offering that can stand alone as the gateway to and from a community health information network or can be bundled as part of an ISV solution.

See also:

• Intel Fourth-Quarter Net Income $2.3 Billion, Up 875% (0)
• Philips updates markets on Healthcare sector in meeting with financial analysts (0)
• Phoenix Firmware Supports New 45nm Intel Core2 Duo Processor T9400 (0)
• Intel, Samsung Electronics, TSMC Reach Agreement for 450mm Wafer Manufacturing Transition (0)