Advancing medicine with high-impact AI solutions

We strive to advance human health. People should benefit from data-driven medical innovations that prevent disease and provide best-in-class procedures and treatment. We invest in data-driven health solutions because we support the patient's desire for personalized, high-precision medicine that allows them to live a longer and healthier life.

Data will become the key enabler for innovations in digital healthcare. Data-driven innovations are essential for medical research and progress. Our tailored and responsible use of data enables us to fill our innovation pipeline, push data-driven medicine, and develop innovative procedures for patients.

We only use data in a purpose-bound manner to develop medical innovations and to enable our data-driven products to perform according to their specified performance capabilities. We treat data responsibly, reliably, and securely. 

We believe that trust and accountability lay the foundation of responsible data privacy management, and therefore we apply high data privacy standards worldwide. The fundamental legal principles of the GDPR – including legitimacy and lawfulness of data processing, purpose limitation, the need-to-know principle, data avoidance, and data economy – are mandatory for Siemens Healthineers worldwide based on our own internal directives. In addition, we apply proven technical standards and organizational measures to ensure data security, authenticity, and confidentiality. Our ISO-certified cybersecurity management system follows a holistic approach and integrates information security management (ISO 27001) and privacy information management (ISO 27701).

Every person should have sovereignty over their own health data. This includes being transparent about what data is used, how it’s used, and for what purposes. They also need to have the right to grant or revoke consent to the use of their data. This right should include the freedom to donate their personal data for the purpose of conducting research, advancing the field of medicine, and improving healthcare solutions. 

The processing of health data in private-sector research and development work also makes a significant contribution to advancing medical and technical progress. To safeguard this valuable contribution, we believe that private-sector research should also be subject to the privilege of research, and that developing medical devices and artificial intelligence that facilitate improvements in the early detection and treatment of illnesses, among other things, also serves the public interest and our public health.

We promote trust throughout society and among all patients in our application of digital technologies, and we support them in exercising their rights accordingly.

Driving digitalization and promoting value creation from data are essential to advancing medical progress and providing efficient, high-quality healthcare. Leveraging the potential of data is strategically important to us. In addition to developing data- and software-driven solutions that support decision-making, we work to continuously develop our portfolio by automating devices and workflows and expanding our use of predictive maintenance. The interoperability and connectivity of our products and solutions are accelerating this development into a platform-oriented business.

We offer a state-of-the-art portfolio of secure products, cybersecurity services, and consulting that helps ensure optimal protection. We continuously improve our systems and processes and train our teams on cybersecurity and data protection to maintain a consistently high level of threat awareness. Our engineering practices include a secure development lifecycle (SDL) to ensure that high cybersecurity standards are implemented for every product and solution. Examples of our core development principles include the implementation of privacy by design and privacy by default.

The key to data-driven healthcare innovation is the ability to interconnect various health datasets. It’s only through data integration and data interoperability that the value of data can be fully utilized. We strongly support the standardization of healthcare data and data sharing. When designing our solutions, we aim to systematically include standardized interfaces like DICOM, FHIR, and increasingly uniform APIs.

Efforts to improve medical knowledge and data-driven healthcare solutions depend largely on having the right to access health data from diverse and genuine sources. We believe that providing fair access to relevant data to all healthcare stakeholders and using this data responsibly to our mutual benefit will contribute to advancing the field of medicine. We therefore build our data-related partnerships on a foundation of fairness and transparency.