The Right Diagnosis
Why Dedalus Diagnostic Imaging IT is a Market Leader and Innovator
Information technology has had a transformative impact on diagnostic imaging. In today’s highly complex and interconnected healthcare environment, innovative solutions need to support all stakeholders across the continuum of care. In addition to this, the daily support line for our clients across the global are key to success.
As director of Dedalus’ Diagnostic Imaging IT (DIIT) business unit, Davor Dadic has deep insight into how the quality of a diagnostic product can support radiologists and clinicians in advancing patient care. Equally, though, Davor understands that the product is only as good as the implementation process and that means it’s important to be able to deliver innovative solutions to customers – hospitals and diagnostic imaging centres – in a qualitative and customer-focused manner.
“Throughout my career, I have been involved with customers, working in hospitals and dealing with services cases, where I got to see first-hand what it means for customers when the system isn’t working and how that impacts patient care,” Davor says.
A Global, Growing Business
DIIT became a Dedalus business unit in February 2021 with the carve out of Agfa´s HCIS and DIIT business (DACH, French and Brazil) and has been going from strength to strength. The unit is mainly based in Europe with many teams across the Dedalus world-wide footprint, such as Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, UKI, France, Latin America, Belgium and Bosnia. While the headquarter with its biggest R&D team is in Vienna, it does reflect the global ambitions of Dedalus’ DIIT business.
“We distinguish our go-to-market strategy between core regions and business development regions,” Davor says. “Focus is the key to continous growth and expansion globally, by leveraging our footprint.”
Today, the DIIT BU employs more than 150 people and is expected to grow to cope with the growth. The growth is in part due to acquisition and business consolidation, but also through new hirings to support expanded project and business plans.
“As Dedalus, we are market leaders across the continuum of care, which enables us to integrate any single part of the healthcare provider activities, from hospital admission and administrative lifecycle, to clinical management, patient discharge and beyond the hospital activities, passing through all diagnostics, from imaging to in-vitro diagnostic. That gives our business benefits that other diagnostic imaging companies don´t have,” Davor says.
A Wider Diagnostic Imaging Vision
As with all diagnostic imaging businesses, Dedalus DIIT’s core business is in radiology, which is a very technically focused specialty. But Davor says the business unit deals with, how they call it, multi-ology image management.
“Everyone across the continuum of care wants to see images – from radiologists, to clinicians, to patients – so our technology innovation touches areas such as endoscopy, ophthalmology, and digital pathology,” he says. “We have a broad range of products to support everything that can be visualised, be it an image, a video, a PDF report or even a Word document.”
The vision of Dedalus’ DIIT business unit is to embed such a platform in the respective information system workflows, such as cardiology systems, hospital systems, labs, etc., and to enable interoperability.
There is also a keen focus on artificial intelligence, especially in light of the fact that 80 percent of AI algorithms are based on images or visualization. However, Davor is clear about the fact that AI results in solutions that bring an added value to the end user – the clinicians and ultimately the patient.
“Many of our customers are universities with research institutes and they turn to us to provide them with data that they can train their AI systems with,” Davor says. “First, the data is anonymised, then aggregated so the institutes can make use of the data to gain insights into patient care. Many AI companies have great algorithms but if you don’t have data to train it on, it isn’t much help in clinical trials and ultimately then it is of no benefit to the patient. AI integration into the clinical workflow is key”.
The DIIT Portfolio
Already, Dedalus DIIT has a rich portfolio of solutions to support diagnostic workflows. The business unit’s portfolio begins with picture archiving and communication system (PACS) and expands into any type of visualization across the multi-ology imaging world.
Within the Dedalus DIIT portfolio is a suite of products and components branded as DeepUnity, under which is a vendor-neutral archive that can store standardised and non-standardised data that can be pulled out and visualised, and a Universal Viewer to enable all stakeholders across the healthcare continuum to visualise a patient’s data. Together with the recently acquired company – and our new colleagues, Dobco Medical Systems, we are leveraging on cloud-native technology. Combined with our DeepUnity Suite, as well as our RIS and Cardiology solutions, Dedalus DIIT will manifest its market leadership further.
“Over the next few years, we will see a shift away from standalone imaging solutions and towards integrated platforms, including radiology information system with cardiology information systems and other information systems,” Davor says.
“By connecting the multi-ology of solutions, clinicians have access to all the information they need to support and improve patient care, rather than having to wait for the radiologists report or reports from orthopaedics or wound care or whatever the case may be,” Davor continues.
This vision aligns with the Dedalus objective to support the continuum of care by combining the solutions and expertise across every business unit within the organisation. Dedalus DIIT can leverage Dedalus’ leadership position in areas such as cloud and software-as-a-service, giving it an advantage over other players in the digital imaging space.
“Certainly, Dedalus’ reputation as the market leader in health IT, with global presence and a diverse portfolio benefits us our DIIT business unit,” Davor says. “As a company, we’re delivering everything that customers are asking for.”
A People-focused Approach
Another advantage Dedalus DIIT has over competitors is its reputation as an exciting people-centric employer. The unit has an extremely low attrition rate and offers opportunity to forward-thinking young talent.
“We lead with empathy and excellence, but we are extremely picky when it comes to new hirings because we understand that technology is bending the global economy, so everyone we bring on needs to be attuned to the world as it now is and to innovation,” Davor says. “It’s not only technical skills that matter; in fact I would say that 60 percent of the deciding factor for me when hiring new staff is soft skills.”
Davor works to create an environment where people can voice their opinions, where hierarchies are irrelevant and where everyone is made to feel part of the business. While the business is spread across different locations, world-wide Davor stays in touch with the entire team through town halls and encourages everyone to share their concerns.
“We have retrospective sessions where people tell me what went wrong over the past months, and the leadership team then takes action to try to improve on those areas,” he says. “If my teams have issues, they are always comfortable telling me and then we work together to develop solutions rather than focus on problems. I believe it’s an environment that encourages innovative thinking and inclusion and as I’ve found if people trust you they will always go the extra mile.”