Mr. Rohit Sathe, President, Philips India Healthcare.

1. Tell us about your journey into Medical device Industry since inception?

 Philips has a legacy of more than a century of innovation and entrepreneurship. Starting from light innovation 1891 to 27 years later in 1918, introducing medical X-ray tube, marking the point when the company diversified its product range and systematically protected its innovations with patents in areas stretching from X-ray radiation to radio reception. In November 2018, we launched the world’s first helium free MR- Ingenia Ambition X 1.5T, enabling helium free operations, thus reducing the chance of potentially lengthy and costly disruptions and virtually eliminating dependency on a commodity with unpredictable supply.

In view of Philips’ focus to make the world healthier and more sustainable through innovation, our solutions are ready to improve hospitals’ workflow and patient care by integrating architecture, design, dynamic lighting and sound. Recent innovations include the development of the Philips Smart Air Purifier and Philips Azurion, the next-generation image-guided therapy platform that enables clinicians to perform a wide range of routine and complex procedures, helping them to optimize interventional lab performance and provide superior care.

Over the years since Philips’ inception, we are committed towards improving people’s lives with a steady flow of ground breaking innovations.

2. Tell us about your role into Philips as a global health leader & achievements?

At Philips, we are striving to make the world healthier and more sustainable through innovation, with the goal of improving the lives of 3 billion people a year by 2025. We are focused to catering all our customers’ needs and driving a shift to value-based healthcare- a system that aims to increase access to care and improve patient outcomes while also raising cost productivity. This robust growth strategy has helped us in transforming Philips from being a product-driven company into a focused leader in health technology, delivering innovation to help people manage their own health and support care providers in providing care effectively and efficiently. With our understanding of many global long-term healthcare challenges, we see major opportunities to apply our innovative competencies in the areas of personal health, diagnosis, treatment, connected care and health informatics.

Philips has the depth of perspective across hospital and home needed to break the boundaries standing in the way of organizing healthcare around the patient. We collaborate on designing innovations to seamlessly bring together people, data and technology to help you achieve first-time-right diagnosis for increased patient and staff satisfaction, better patient outcomes and lower costs. Taking our customer’s strategy and needs as our starting point, we are increasingly shifting towards developing integrated solutions that really make the difference across health ecosystem. In the clinical space, we are focusing on delivering integrated solutions – packaged suites of systems, smart devices, software and services that we put together with our partners and customers to solve a particular problem. In this way we actively address the challenges that healthcare providers are facing, helping to improve patient outcomes and productivity. This might involve one department or service, an entire care pathway or even an entire hospital.

In simple terms there are two types of solution, of increasing complexity and value. The first type is configured solutions – packaged/bundled propositions that integrate products, software and services to deliver greater value, in terms of outcomes, than the sum of the individual parts. This may involve the introduction of new business models.

Our Diagnosis & Treatment businesses enable efficient, first-time-right diagnosis and precision therapies through digital imaging and clinical informatics solutions. Our Connected Care & Health Informatics businesses empower consumers and care professionals with predictive patient analytics and clinical informatics solutions. Our Personal Health businesses enable people to take care of their health by delivering connected products and services

We have strong positions across the health continuum to build a leading company in health technology. Our health technology businesses have leading positions in diagnostic imaging, image-guided therapy, patient monitoring and health informatics, as well as in consumer health and home care. Our professional healthcare and consumer portfolios are increasingly connected and data-driven through Philips’ cloud-based HealthSuite digital platform.  This positions us to serve consumers, clinicians and caregivers in an increasingly connected world, in a much better way.

We are extremely proud of the progress and we continue to make a difference.

3. What are the latest advancement in radiology & Imaging devices sector?

As health organizations continue to move toward value-based care, they need intelligent solutions to meet the challenges they face in improving outcomes, lowering cost of healthcare delivery and enhancing patient and staff experience.  At recently concluded RSNA 2018, Philips highlighted its new portfolio of innovative imaging systems, intelligent software applications and associated services. These solutions connect people, data and technology and have been designed to meet the requirements of the quadruple aim: improved outcomes, enhanced patient experience, increased staff satisfaction and lowered cost of care delivery. Recently, Philips also showcased portfolio of innovative solutions in radiology to enable precision diagnosis and enhance productivity. These solutions connect people, data and technology and have been designed to meet the requirements of the quadruple aim: improved outcomes, enhanced patient experience, increased staff satisfaction and lowered cost of care delivery.

In the artificial intelligence segment, Philips announced the launch of IntelliSpace Discovery which is a comprehensive, open platform to enable the development and deployment of Artificial Intelligence assets in radiology with the aim to support radiologists in their clinical and translational research. In the Ingenia MRI portfolio, Philips’ Ingenia Ambition 1.5T MR is the latest advance. The portfolio comprises fully-digital MRI systems, healthcare informatics and a range of maintenance and life cycle services for integrated solutions that break down diagnostic boundaries by delivering speed, comfort and confidence, all with the aim to help improve patient care. Apart from this, key mentions would be Pinnacle Evolution, Big Bore RT (CT system designed to provide precise treatment planning through enhanced accuracy in lesion identification, tissue density calculation and segmentation), Philips Digital Diagnost C90, Ingenia Elition 3.0T MR-RT and Ambition X 1.5T MR-RT systems. The overall purpose is to improve staff satisfaction, patient experience and enhance cost effectiveness.