Interview with Tom Francke, president and CEO of Hermes Medical Solutions

Tom, you are the new President and CEO of Hermes Medical Solutions. Can you give us a short resume of your previous involvement in the medical imaging field and give us a short idea of the company? Where is it based and in how many countries it is already involved in?

It is an honour to lead the innovative Hermes team. After three years on the board of directors I know the company rather well. I am trained as associate professor in astroparticle physics specialised in radiation detectors, and have been part of growing medical imaging companies for 22 years in X-ray and ultrasound imaging.

Hermes is one of the pioneering software companies in nuclear medicine and has supplied the medical community with image display and processing software for 44 years. We are proud of focusing on innovation to be the leader of new developments and bring the best applications to the market.

Hermes simplifies the workflow for the clinicians in diagnosis and therapy in nuclear medicine providing excellent viewers and analysis tools.

Hermes software is vendor neutral and accepts DICOM data from all camera manufacturers with consistent results for patient follow up regardless of the camera brand. The multimodality software supports a wide range of imaging procedures with dedicated workflows. Our professional support staff is responsive and match the nuclear medicine expertise of our customers and can discuss in detail the processing algorithms and results.

We have installations in more than 40 countries and are present globally.

Hermes Medical Solutions is a well implanted international company in the Nuclear Medicine Healthcare World. What are the biggest challenges of Hermes Medical Solutions in the immediate future?

The largest challenge, and opportunity, in the near future is to introduce our new revolutionary Affinity suite of products. During EANM 2019 we present a disruptive Viewer, which in the coming months will we followed by new innovative plugin applications in oncology, cardiology, neurology, dosimetry and other nuclear medicine procedures.

The Viewer differs significantly from all other viewers on the market. We have employed expert developers from the gaming industry to revolutionize the performance and usability of the Affinity Viewer to create a completely new experience for clinical software. The workflow and layout are fully configurable down to the smallest detail to simplify and personalize the workflow of each clinicians for maximum efficiency and accuracy. All operations are intuitive reducing the training time to a minimum. The new data loading is instant eliminating all waiting time. The image fusion capabilities are automatic and limitless, where a limitless number of images from any modalities taken by any camera brand at any instant can be fused in any way the user desires. It has large number of image analysis tools to simplify and speed up the workflow. It is designed to handle multiple time points and multiple modality imaging with ease through a powerful simple user interface. The Affinity Viewer introduces a new level of expert reporting in nuclear medicine. It is designed for speed and engineered for quality.

Where is Hermes Medical Solutions going and what will be the impact for the Hermes Medical Solutions users?

The Affinity suite will be the future flagship of Hermes and will set a new gold standard in nuclear medicine procedures. The users will experience more accurate diagnosis capabilities, more diagnostic applications supported and a personalized workflow for high throughput in all clinical scenarios.

We continuously bring new applications to the market based on the latest clinical discoveries. We believe nuclear medicine will be more personalized, move more and more into molecular radiotherapy with strong needs on dosimetry and therapy planning. The number of examinations will increase demanding smoother workflows and instant response. The time for training and learning different systems will be reduced demanding intuitive user interfaces.

How is Hermes Medical Solutions involved in the incontournable contribution of Artificial Intelligence? What will it mean to Hermes Medical Solution’s partners?

Artificial intelligence is the future of all advanced software applications. Hermes is strongly positioned in this development where the R&D team has extensive experience in machine learning and other AI applications. We continuously implement AI in our software development and include many new automatic or semi-automatic applications into the Affinity suite. For the clinician it will simplify and speed up the workflow, enable more accurate diagnosis and make the care provider less dependent on the scarce highly trained resources at the hospitals to increase the throughput of patients.

Finally, what is your greatest wish for Hermes Solutions and its clients?

Our customers, and the whole medical community, is our strongest focus. We welcome all the feedback we can get to develop and give back the best possible products the community will need in the future. Let us continue and deepen the fruitful and mutual cooperation we have today.

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