March 13, 2018 — At the 2018 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference & Exhibition, March 5-9 in Las Vegas, Siemens Healthineers showcased the Proactive Follow-up solution as part of its Siemens Healthineers Digital Ecosystem. The application prompts the appropriate physician to initiate a medically necessary response based on care gaps identified.
For example, an incidental finding, an abnormality that appears in a radiology report intended for a different screening or diagnosis, can be proactively managed by digitalizing the identification, follow-up and decision making steps. With artificial intelligence leveraging natural language processing (NLP) and both unstructured and structured data, the solution gives access to customizable, evidence-based guidelines to enable the appropriate physician to determine next steps in a patient’s care pathway. This may help to transform care delivery and reduce variations in care for better patient outcomes.
Gaps in care pose multiple challenges to healthcare organizations. For example, approximately 35 percent of incidental findings that require follow-up do not receive it. Healthcare systems are challenged to decide whether or not findings are useful, how to track and visualize gaps, how to determine which physician should follow up, and, if appropriate, what necessary next steps should be taken.
In addressing these challenges, the Proactive Follow-up application ultimately completes five steps to close gaps in care. First, the application identifies patients with care gaps, which may require follow-up. Second, the application allows the care team to visualize a prioritized worklist of all patients potentially requiring follow-up. Third, Proactive Follow-up provides recommendations for clinical care pathways based on clinical guidelines and best practices customized by the needs of the healthcare organization. Fourth, it enables the physician to determine and take action with appropriate steps in care. Finally, it determines if the gap is closed.
The Proactive Follow-up solution features a patient worklist with a simple, customizable design. It can be either integrated into an organization’s electronic health record (EHR) system or accessed from a cloud-based application. The clinical guidelines suggested by the application are based on an organization’s best practices to reduce variability.
Siemens Global Head of Population Health Management Robert Taylor said that proactive follow-up of care gaps such as incidental findings can play an important role in population health management to improve patient experience by producing outcomes that matter most to patients.
The Proactive Follow-up software solution is still under development and not commercially available.
For more information: www.usa.healthcare.siemens.com
May 16, 2025 
