February 13, 2017 -- Siemens Healthineers -- Helping connect healthcare experts and increasing the usability of the wealth of medical imaging data – that’s the goal of ‘teamplay’, the new solution from Siemens Healthineers, now available in Canada.

This cloud-based network1 helps link hospitals and healthcare experts to provide them with the ability to exchange data and pool their knowledge. Within hospitals, ‘teamplay’ makes it possible to evaluate the extensive amount of information generated by imaging devices – e.g. scanner capacity utilization, examination times or radiation doses – and to compare the numbers against in-house and third–party reference values. This means imaging devices can be analyzed in close to real-time and their operation optimized based on the results.

As ‘teamplay’ runs on tablets, laptops, and desktop PCs, members of the network have flexible access to the information, subject to the appropriate authorization and security measures.

“Siemens Healthineers products are used to diagnose or treat around 200,000 patients around the world every hour. In the process, our customers generate a vast amount of data, but they currently can use only a fraction of the information,” says Steve Mainguy, Business Line Manager, Digital Health Services, Siemens Healthineers Canada. “‘teamplay’ is intended to help healthcare practitioners combine the mass of data available to them, analyze it and exchange it with other experts, forming the basis for prompt and well informed decision-making.”

An easy-to-install DICOM application connects to the ‘teamplay’ user network. Data relevant for the valuation is de-identified and encrypted for transmission to the ‘teamplay’ cloud, where it can be accessed at any time with the appropriate authorization.

The ‘teamplay’ dashboard allows users to read the information they want to read at a glance: how many patients were examined; how long the average examination took; what the capacity utilization of the various modalities or individual scanners are; how long the interval is between individual examinations. In graphical form, ‘teamplay’ provides answers to these and other questions, all designed to help imaging departments work more effectively.

The ‘teamplay’ network can also be used to monitor the doses applied by medical devices. As with all examinations involving ionizing radiation, it is essential in these cases to apply dose only as low as reasonably achievable. ‘teamplay’ can continuously monitor the dose used, broken down by the parts of the body volumes being examined. Here, too, target values can be defined and deviations clearly shown.

‘teamplay’ supports radiologists by making images and results available securely and in de-identified form to other physicians world-wide to draw on their expertise. This also means that results can be quickly and easily shared between radiologists and referring and treating physicians, to provide the parties involved in treating the patient access to all relevant patient information.

“‘teamplay’ brings transparency to the modality fleet,” continued Steve Mainguy. “With its built-in multi-vendor support, it grants instant1 access to fleet statistics. More crucially, it empowers healthcare professionals to identify improvement potential on all levels of execution.”

1 Prerequisites include: Internet connection to clinical network, DICOM compliance, meeting of minimum hardware
requirements, and adherence to local data security regulations.

Further information about ‘teamplay’ is available at: https://bps-healthcare.siemens.com/teamplay/en


Siemens Healthineers is the separately managed healthcare business of Siemens AG and enables healthcare providers around the world to meet their current challenges and to excel in their respective environments. A leader in medical technology, Siemens Healthineers is constantly innovating its portfolio of products and services in both its core areas in imaging for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes as well as in laboratory diagnostics and molecular medicine. Siemens Healthineers is also continuously developing its digital health services and hospital management offerings, working closely with operators to develop common fields of business and to help them to not only minimize their risks, but also to exploit new opportunities.

Further information is available on the Internet at www.siemens.com/healthineers