Swallowing the red pill. A reply to Tobi Gilk's "Remote Scanning 'Customer Problem'"

All right, Tobias Gilk . So here we are: “Remote Scanning’s ‘customer problem’”… well written, I must admit. A list of controversial statements that are, let’s say, not all exactly flattering for us OEM remote scanning business developers. But you and I, we’ve taken the red pill now, so let’s dive into it. Let me dissect your hypotheses, and as I don’t want to bore our readers with going through each and every statement, I will start off by trying to create clarity about goals and motive of remote scanning overall. Because in the end, the job we’re all trying to get done (you, me, everybody passionate about this stuff) is making sure that patients get the right MRI scan where and when needed.

So let me put forth a controversial statement of my own: Almost every country on the planet suffers from a drastic shortage of radiology technologists. But if you look at overall MRI scans to be done, and then you add up how many technologists there are in a given country, then there’s not that much of a shortage at all. The real problem is workforce distribution, or better SKILL DISTRIBUTION. The fundamental problem is that skill in radiology is unevenly distributed across geography and time. And if you look at the problem through this lens, then the proliferation of remote scanning is logically inevitable.

Why is that? Well let me tell you about a little kitchen table conversation I had with my dad when I started as a product manager for remote scanning at Siemens Healthineers in October 2019. My dad is a physics professor, and more precisely he is an expert in membrane process technology. So he deals with things like diffusion, permeation, the inescapable forces of cause and effect. And what he said was the following: “Lukas, I think that’s a brilliant idea. But, you maybe wanna consider this: You’re not really in the radiology business, you’re in the pipeline business. Picture the world as a large number of bottles of water, filled with ‘skill water’. Some bottles are full, some are half empty. Each bottle resembles a radiology department and the water is the cumulative skill of technologists available to the department. And you, Lukas, you’re trying to build pipelines between all of those radiologies. And if you do a good job and you reduce physical friction and resistance in those pipelines to a minimum, then water is going to flow. Is simple physics.”

Smart dude, don’t you think? Big fan ??… Alright, so let’s relate that back to your article: As said, I think that there is at least some truth to all of your hypotheses, however, it’s important how we frame the problem we’re trying to solve. And if you frame it the way my dad has done it for me, then you will pretty quickly realize why I couldn’t care less about whether the actual remote scanning software is orange or blue or purple, or whether it has rockets printed all over it. I simply don’t care. Because it doesn’t matter, having good connectivity and being able to oversee a couple of scanners simultaneously is not worth the sales conversation. It’s important, and it’s difficult to solve, and it may be expensive in terms of R&D, but unfortunately it’s the bare minimum every company that wants to enter the remote scanning market has to deliver to even start playing.

So think again, Tobi. If you read this, do you really think that Moritz, and Kari, and Sonja, and Andre, and all those awesome folks that I have the privilege working with at Healthineers haven’t thought about “the sticky legal and liability questions about remote operation” you think we’re ignorant about? We’ll here’s a little project secret: When Moritz (he’s my technical brain at Healthineers) and I mapped out the project 4.5 years ago we laid out a few ground rules. And the most important one is the following: If a topic scares off our legal, quality, or regulatory department, then THAT’s our topic. Because that’s where you create value, and that’s how you bring down the friction and the resistance in all of those pipelines.

Back to you, Tobi!

#mri #remotescanning #mrsafety #wescan