Artificial Intelligence in Medtech
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing the work of healthcare professionals and how we deal with the health of our citizens and care about patients around the world. The pace of this change is accelerating. AI offers excellent opportunities to improve the health of the population and alleviate the ever so increasing pressure on the healthcare system.
The Netherlands and Germany are facing opportunities as well as challenges where AI in Health and Care is concerned. Valuable and reliable AI for people’s care demands collaboration to be able to solve issues. We cannot do this alone: AI is multidisciplinary and requires close cooperation between policy makers, care professionals, scientists and entrepreneurs. At the same time also transnational collaboration between the involved stakeholders is necessary. Therefore, the Netherlands and Germany invest in strengthening the collaboration in the area of ICT and health.
Application of AI in healthcare is broad, and therefore can help shift the trend from a reactive to a proactive healthcare system (prevention). That can lead to faster and better diagnoses and treatments (recommendations) optimised for every individual patient. AI can also provide insights that support better self-management of chronic patients. On a national or even international scale, AI can be used to gain faster insight into and to respond to epidemics – and these are just a few examples. With multiple applications, AI can also contribute to the right care at the right place (at the right time).
The Netherlands AI Coalition (NL AIC) working group Healthcare
The Netherlands has always been at the forefront of digitisation of healthcare and its necessary infrastructure. Globally, we see that considerable investments are being made in AI. This is the moment to scale up valuable Dutch AI applications together and to put in order the necessary structural data infrastructure and other preconditions (such as finance and knowledge). Together we can also create a climate to accelerate the application of innovations in the field of AI in the health and care sector.
More information: https://nlaic.com/toepassingsgebied/gezondheid-en-zorg/
Artificial Intelligence as key enabling technology for MedTech
Germany is one of Europe’s largest medical technology markets with for example the highest absolute number of people employed in the medical technology sector. The Netherlands are characterized by a wide range of innovative life sciences & health companies and research organizations. The Netherlands is also one of the top exporters of medtech equipment in the world.
Germany’s innovation landscape is characterized by public-private clusters that evolve around government programs, research institutes and/or businesses. More than half of the German medtech clusters are based in Baden-Württemberg.
We put the emphasis on the exchange of knowledge and experience in the area of AI as key enabling technology for MedTech developments. Both the Netherlands and Germany (in particular the state of Baden-Württemberg) are among the frontrunners in terms of data-driven health and medical technology. The respective Life Sciences and Health sectors can therefore benefit from each other's expertise and strengthen the bilateral cooperation.
In the bilateral expert session Dutch and German experts discuss the opportunities and challenges for AI in the medtech domain. Medical technologies play an important role to improve people’s lives and health. AI as a digital health and care technology can improve prevention, (early) diagnostics, effective treatments, as well as management of lifestyle. Artificial Intelligence is thus focus area of medtech.
New technologies bring new opportunities, but also new challenges. Issues around secondary use of data, patient trust or data availability are similar in both countries. For the development of data-driven medical technology data is needed as the basis, and both the Netherlands and Germany face challenges in these areas. Often the challenges and recommendations can divided in three categories: IT infrastructure and standardized data; validation approval and implementation, and; political and social frameworks.
A valuable AI for health and care requires national and international (European) cooperation in the medtech domain. The expert session can be a first step towards a joint position or strategy on these challenges. During the expert session these topics can be discussed, and a common ground can be defined for ideas and concepts about further cooperation.
