Feature: Medical
Collaborative product development of a medical 'connector'
By Zeljko Loncaric, Marketing Engineer, Congatec T
he growing digitalisation of healthcare systems is driving up the complexity of tasks connected devices must fulfil. Particularly the handling of highly-
sensitive data poses additional challenges for the digital transformation in the healthcare sector. Experts from different companies are
therefore increasingly working together to meet product development challenges instead of shutting themselves off from each other with specifications and linear project phases. The goal is to become faster, better and more efficient, instead of getting bogged down in specifications, and to apply agility not only to their own in-house development but to the entire project across all involved stakeholders – using frameworks such as Scrum. This requires a fundamentally different culture of collaboration between companies than is possible in traditional customer/supplier relationships and
strictly hierarchical corporate structures. Companies need to become more open
and enter into deeper partnerships with one another if they want to work together more efficiently. Te ultimate aim is to develop a high-performance culture in the project-specific teams that is based on trust, error tolerance and results, enabling a high-performance capability. A similar openness, by the way, is also
encouraged by trends such as the Sharing Economy, which no longer revolves around owning things, but rather sharing them – an approach that ultimately increases sustainability, since resources can be optimally utilised in this way. Besides, it is also a fact that processes simply take too long if companies shut themselves off and don’t define the success of the joint project as the most important goal.
Digital healthcare ecosystem Te companies involved in the development of a connector for the
54 December/January 2021
www.electronicsworld.co.uk
telematics infrastructure of Germany’s digital healthcare system have been quick to recognise this. Today, the Secunet connector is already being used in around 50,000 medical practices, enabling them to use digital services such as medical emergency data management (MEDM), electronic medication plans (eMP) and qualified electronic signatures (QES). Such applications make daily tasks for physicians more efficient and, ultimately, support further digitisation of healthcare. In the future, it should also become possible to exchange e-prescriptions via the digital healthcare network. Te connector acts as a link between the doctor’s practice and pharmacy, for example – i.e., the so-called medical service provider and telematics infrastructure. Doctors or pharmacists need to identify themselves clearly with the help of a so-called institution card, the SMC-B card, before they can connect as a service provider with the infrastructure resources of the digital healthcare system.
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