Interview with Mikael Strindlund

ePatient: You have been actively involved in medical imaging quite a while. Looking back at your career what are the most significant changes that you have witnessed in the field of medical imaging?

I have now been working in the medical device and medical IT space for some 15 years. Interesting enough, I would say that over the past 5 years there has been a significant change in the healthcare world. Much more focus is now on the patient, a drive towards personal well-care instead of healthcare. We see a clear shift towards patient centric solutions. At the same time, there is considerable pressure to optimize the allocation of resources in order to provide the most benefit for the patient. There is a lot of pressure coming from reimbursement entities (both public and private) forcing healthcare providers benchmarking and quantifying patient outcome.

We are today looking at the entire diagnosis and the treatment pathway for the patient AND it’s all about “First Time Right” – both how we diagnose and treat the patient but also a First Time Right for the healthcare providers. No-one of us wants to be a trial – we dare to question the opinion of the physician, we want references, 2nd and 3rd opinions, we want the best care ever. In addition, we request individualized and personalized healthcare – nothing more and nothing less.

For the healthcare provider, another challenge is to provide the best and personalized care at reasonable cost structure. The healthcare providers – on the other side – try to drive healthcare towards standardization and industrialized care.

ePatient: Hermes used to be a family owned company. 2 years ago, it became a corporate entity and you are now its CEO.  What are  the vision  and mission of the new corporation for Hermes Medical and how will it affect its relationship with present and future customers?

Hermes is pursuing innovation initially started for more than 40 years ago. We are privileged working with the best institutions across the world, supporting research and partners developing cutting edge technologies.

We continue to strengthen and deepen the very close relationships we have with our customers. The strength of Hermes is to have the close and quick turnaround time of workflow and process improvements our customers suggest in cooperation with us. We strive to continue to be the leading provider of end to end enterprise solutions within the field of nuclear medicine. We are vendor agnostic and offer best in suite regarding integrated informatics solutions to enable clinical excellence and business intelligence – improving diagnostic and treatment pathways, resulting in significant enhanced clinical, operational and financial outcomes. In the last two years, we have made significant investments to consolidate and strengthen our position in the market. This includes our R&D activities as well as our sales and service support organizations.

The vendor neutral solutions Hermes offers, are truly in line with the ongoing consolidation of healthcare providers to larger enterprises. We see this trend all over the world. Integration and connectivity are becoming more and more important every day. By  simplifying and standardizing workflow, the clinical outcome is significantly improved at much less costs. It also allows for a higher grade of flexibility among the staff, across different sites in remote reading as well reduces the need for education and human errors. Intuitive and adaptive user interfaces and the access to relevant patient data are key items for a patient centric and cost effective health care.

ePatient: What do you anticipate the role of artificial intelligence (AI) be in the field of nuclear medicine?

Artificial Intelligence is a big topic momentarily. It’s extremely important to understand that AI is an umbrella of different categories and approaches like machine learning, deep learning, supervised learning, neural networks, etc. Thinking that Artificial Intelligence will replace the clinician’s diagnostic is a mistake. However, aggregating different source of information and helping the clinician in his decision-making process is where AI will definitively play a role. AI-based measurements and quantifications are tools we will see in near future. We at Hermes are working in different fields of active decision support tools. All with the aim to significantly improve efficiency as the healthcare providers are under pressure to deliver high-quality services and care. A new challenge the industry today is facing is availability of patient data for software development and the complex ongoing challenges surrounding data protection as a hurdle for the access to health and patient data.

ePatient: You have had the opportunity to read the first two issues of the NM magazine Pangea- ePatient. What do you think of the magazine and what would your suggestions be to improve it?

I like the magazine a lot. I think it’s essential to communicate the benefits and latest updates in Molecular Imaging to referring doctors and patients. Maintaining communication channels open worldwide is the only way forward if we want to expand clinical applications of Molecular Imaging. A nice add-on would be to present clinical cases that are both challenging for the referring doctor and nuclear medicine physicians. All with the focus on patient’s WellCare and the best clinical outcome.