For application software you can start with something simple and then build it out. We have standardized all our software development.

HCB News: How do capital equipment imaging systems such as MR and CT scanners fit into the push for software innovation?

FVH: That continues. We talked about the 40/60 – a large portion of the $1.7 billion we invest into R&D goes into hardware and systems development.



For example, take the innovations we've made with spectral CT — the dual imaging acquisition is the great advance of our IQon product — where you can reconstruct that image in software after the fact and in any way you like. In other words, you can do post-processing and identify much better cancer diagnostics from the raw images acquired by the IQon.

To what extent are those diagnostics obtained by the system and to what extent is that done in post-processing in an image on your PACS? That becomes fluid so, in a way, you could say that we are liberating the image acquisition device from the necessity to process that image. That’s quite a breakthrough and I think we are making great strides with that.

HCB News: Is there any sense of how the new U.S. presidential administration could impact the trends we're seeing in health care technology?

FVH: I find it difficult to interpret but I will say that value based care — whatever name we give it — is going to be the future. Patients want precision health and first-time-right outcomes, so outcomes will be measured and some form of bundled payments will also happen. That combination means hospitals will drive outcomes and productivity.

We can put any label on it but I’ve seen it all over the world: value based care and higher productivity are the two drivers that are happening.

HCB News: With RSNA in the books, what is the next health care event Philips is gearing up for?

FVH: We will have a big showing at Arab Health in January and we're also looking forward to HIMSS in February.

HCB News: What can we expect from Philips at HIMSS?

FVH: For one thing, we are planning to open up HealthSuite — our cloud-based health care platform which we now use for all our internal products from sleep and respiratory care to acute care — to third-party developers to get other companies creating applications for diagnosis or treatment, or home care programs for our platform.


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