Healthcare Perspectives

Lung cancer has the highest mortality rate of all cancers. Globally, it is the deadliest cancer among men and women. One of the biggest contributing factors to lung cancer’s devastation is that it often goes undetected in its early stages. Because the lungs don’t have pain receptors and the chest cavity allows a relatively spacious growing environment for tumors, symptoms typically don’t manifest until the disease has progressed significantly. It’s for these reasons that screening higher-risk patients for lung cancer is so important, as early detection provides the best chance of survival from the disease.

In this episode, Dr. Victoria Schneider, clinical oncology consultant at Siemens Healthineers, is joined by Dr. Richard Booton, clinical director for lung cancer and thoracic surgery at Wythenshawe Hospital and professor of respiratory medicine at the University of Manchester in the UK; Rimma Kondrashova, a radiology resident at Hannover Medical School in Germany; and doctors David Yankelevitz and Claudia Henschke, both radiologists and professors of radiology at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine in New York City.

You’ll hear from these experts about the importance of early detection, the programs that have been recently rolled out to increase survival rates, and some of the exciting new advancements in the field.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Early detection is a key factor in the successful treatment of lung cancer

• Government funded screening programs in the US and the UK have made significant headway in early-stage lung cancer diagnoses

• In Germany, the HANSE Study was created to assess what a successful national lung cancer screening program might look like for the country

• Mobile screening clinics have been implemented in order to move lung cancer screenings out of hospitals and into more readily accessible community spaces

• AI has had a major impact on several areas of lung cancer screenings, including improving the image resolution of scans and helping radiologists by minimizing the often-tedious work of reading images

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The carbon footprint of healthcare has been estimated to be 4 to 5% of the worldwide total. To put this number into perspective, if “healthcare” was a country, it would be the fifth largest emitter in the world, coming in just behind China, the United States, India, and Russia. Today we face pressing global issues like climate change and an energy crisis, that impact our health and wellbeing. It becomes crucial then, that the healthcare industry not only takes responsibility for health, but also actively works towards reducing the impact of the environment on people’s health – especially by reducing emissions and consumption of resources.

In this episode, Shikha Pillai, Global Head of Sustainability at Siemens Healthineers, is joined by Dr. Elmar Merkle, Head of the Department of Radiology and Chief Physician for Radiology and Nuclear Medicine at the University Hospital Basel in Switzerland; as well as Dr. Christopher Hess, Chair of the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at the University of California San Francisco; and Dr. Clemens Juettner, Chief Sustainability Officer at Sana Kliniken in Munich. These experts in radiology and sustainability are talking about what the sector is doing to implement consumption-reducing measures that can lead to not only operational efficiency, but also contribute significantly to our sustainable future.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• For hospitals around the globe, the perpetual “idling” state of imagining machines contributes to the huge carbon footprint of radiology departments.

• On a global average, one hospital bed consumes the same amount of energy as four family homes annually.

• Major strides have been made toward more energy efficient imaging machines, but the most pressing issue is encouraging their use by the medical community.

• The production and delivery of imaging equipment can have massive environmental repercussions.

• It’s not just carbon footprint that can be reduced by greener radiology practices: cost is also a crucial factor.

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Urine is more than a natural waste product—it can provide a wealth of information about an individual’s overall health, and urinalysis is one of the oldest diagnostic tests in existence. Its use has been dated as far back as Mesopotamia and ancient Greek physician Hippocrates wrote extensively about the use of urinalysis in diagnosing disease in the 6th century BCE.

Today, urinalysis can be used to detect a number of diseases and ailments including urinary tract infections, kidney disease, diabetes, and bladder cancer.

In this episode, Will Hutt, Head of Primary Care, Acute Rapid & Decentralized Urinalysis at Siemens Healthineers, is joined by Nancy Brunzel, a medical laboratory scientist and author of the book Fundamentals of Urine and Body Fluid Analysis and Jon Stradinger, director of assay development for point of care at Siemens Healthineers. We’ll also hear from two experts interviewed for Siemens Healthineers’ recent five-part docuseries about the history of urinalysis: Medical Author and Educator Connie Mardis and Kelly St. Vrain, the head of marketing operations for diagnostics at Siemens Healthineers. They’re discussing the current state of urinalysis, where it could go in the future, and what it all means for the overall patient experience.

Watch Siemens Healthineers’ five-part docuseries Urine, A Liquid Lens into Your Health

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Urinalysis is cost-effective and non-invasive—two reasons it is such a popular diagnostic tool.

• Urinalysis can play an integral role in the early detection of serious diseases.

• Advances in urinalysis such as automated test strip readers have brought new innovations in the consistency and quality control of the test.

• There is a lot of potential for the role that artificial intelligence may come to play in interpreting the data of urinalysis results.

• Urinalysis has existed for millennia, but it will remain an invaluable tool in healthcare.

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A vast number of cancer patients will undergo radiotherapy during their treatment process. Because of this, experts are searching for ways to treat patients as effectively as they can through radiotherapy while also reducing the treatment’s side effects as much as possible. One answer to this is adaptive radiotherapy. Recent advancements in AI and imaging technology have refined the process and made new solutions possible.

These advancements have made it easier for healthcare professionals to adapt treatment to real-time images of the patient's anatomy. This helps to preserve the health of organs surrounding the targeted area and treat patients more effectively.

Today, Sasa Mutic, Senior Vice President at Varian Medical Systems, a Siemens Healthineers company, is joined by Dr. Eric Horwitz, Chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Temple University and Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia; Jennifer Pursley, Medical Physicist and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School; and Kirsten Offereins-van Harten, a senior radiotherapeutic technician at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands. They discuss how advancements in adaptive radiology technology have transformed the patient experience and the field as a whole—and where it may take us in the future.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Adaptive radiotherapy allows real time scans of a patient in order to better, more precisely treat tumors.
• Improvement of imaging technology advances the ability to contour organs, which is a major aid in avoiding collateral damage around the target.
• Adaptive radiotherapy has the potential to reduce the ill effects of typical radiological treatments by focusing on a more precise target, therefore allowing patients to maintain their quality of life.
• Adaptive radiotherapy greatly changes the way that providers work together to create a treatment path.
• Artificial intelligence can potentially expedite the process of adaptive radiotherapy by allowing for a more accurate picture of the contours around affected organs.

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The World Health Organization states that access to care is a human right. This means all world citizens should have access to quality health care and services, whenever and wherever they need it. To reach this goal, skilled employees are required at all levels of the healthcare system.

For many low- and middle-income countries, this access is extremely difficult and training and development programs for workers within the field of radiology are often unavailable, only perpetuating the staffing shortage issue.

Of particular concern is staff shortages in radiology and radiotherapy. In this episode, you’ll hear about potential solutions to this problem, including collaboration to facilitate, expand, and improve training coupled with innovations in health technologies.

Today, Ven Virah, Global Contingent Staffing Expert, Workforce Solutions at Siemens Healthineers, is joined by Jeannette Parkes, a clinical director at Access to Care Cape Town and Head of the division of Clinical and Radiation Oncology at Groote Schuur Hospital and the University of Cape Town, as well as Barry Asin, President at Staffing Industry Analysts in Mountain View, California, and Dr. Katja Beitat, Head of Health Tech at Cicada Innovations and Director of Technology and Innovation at Radiology Across Borders in Sydney.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• That the COVID-19 pandemic, an aging society, resignations, and retirements all contribute to the healthcare staffing crisis (02:45)
• Collaboration is one of the keys to spreading knowledge and increasing the availability of care in underserved areas (06:02)
• In areas with few opportunities for healthcare, remote consultations have become invaluable (08:15)
• How programs allowing healthcare workers to upskill or learn entirely new practices have been aided by VR and AI (11:04)
• Sustainable education programs for medical professionals in low- and middle-income countries have become an important tool for improving care in those areas (13:39)

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