Siemens Healthineers delivers services to customers’ on-premises machines with Azure Arc

Siemens Healthineers provides medical equipment, software, and IT consulting to hospitals to help them deliver better patient care. The main business of the company is selling and servicing diagnostic equipment such as MRI scanners, CT scanners, X-ray machines, and ultrasound machines to hospitals in 70 countries across the globe. The machines are loaded with Siemens Healthineers software applications, which optimize performance and provide specialized services. 

Siemens Healthineers has a software application called teamplay Receiver, which runs inside customers’ networks and is co-located to on-site diagnostic equipment, such as MRI and CT scanners. teamplay Receiver connects to the cloud service that Siemens Healthineers developed, teamplay digital health platform, which runs on Microsoft Azure. The locally deployed teamplay Receiver software was designed with data privacy in mind. Building seamless connectivity for teamplay from the cloud to the edge—the on-premises equipment where images are created and processed—would allow Siemens Healthineers to update its equipment-based software faster and introduce customers to new services. 

For a variety of reasons, Siemens Healthineers’ customers must keep and process much of their scanning machine data on-premises. Data privacy rules vary among countries and among health care providers, with some preventing patient information from leaving hospital grounds under any circumstances. Even when it’s not required, some hospitals choose to process their data in an on-premises infrastructure because of privacy concerns. In other cases, hospitals lack the bandwidth to send large image files back and forth. Because of this critical constraint, Siemens Healthineers needed a way to connect to edge machines without sending patient data to the cloud. It developed a partial solution allowing remote connections to machines, but it had many limitations.

A better connection

To establish a better, more flexible, and scalable way of connecting to hospital machines, Siemens Healthineers reengineered its teamplay Receiver software to be able to run microservices on local Kubernetes clusters. Then the company adopted a preview version of Azure Arc. 

With Azure Arc, Siemens Healthineers can deploy and manage applications on Kubernetes clusters across tens of thousands of locations. It can also monitor, update, and help secure all applications from Azure, where its teamplay cloud runs. “Azure Arc is the key technology we use to deliver software as a service to the edge within our customers’ local on-premises networks,” says Thomas Gossler, Chief Architect for teamplay at Siemens Healthineers. 

Azure Arc also allows Siemens Healthineers to view and manage all infrastructure, policies, and assets—whether they’re running in on-premises datacenters, at machines on the edge, or in the cloud—from a single control plane in Azure. 

In the same Azure Arc control plane, Siemens Healthineers can receive machine information, including data about infrastructure use, storage capacity, and software performance. It can then send customers the patches and updates they need as soon as they are available for deployment. 

“With Azure Arc, we can manage a multitude of edge devices and containerized workloads for our customers on-premises and offer this service to them at a reasonable cost,” says Frank Konopka, Senior Advisor for Digital Business and Digital Ecosystems at Siemens Healthineers. 

In addition, Siemens Healthineers can use Azure Arc to provide critical updates and fix machines remotely. For example, Siemens Healthineers can use this capability in certain post-processing scenarios, in which AI algorithms running in teamplay analyze hundreds of images in minutes. If a bug prevents the software on teamplay Receiver from working, a radiologist might need to spend hours analyzing images manually. Azure Arc alerts Siemens Healthineers to such problems in real time, and technicians can fix them remotely, saving time and money for both the company and hospitals.

A world of new software

Siemens Healthineers’ partners have developed hundreds of specialized diagnostic applications that the company believes its customers would like to try, but the process is too complicated. “There’s a lot of good software out there, but implementing it is overwhelming for our customers,” says Konopka. “They would have to contract with hundreds of vendors and integrate the software into their clinical systems, which is very costly and time-consuming.” 

With Azure Arc, Siemens Healthineers can deliver partner applications directly to machines at the edge, avoiding the need for systemwide integration, and manage them all from the Azure Arc control plane. “We can be a single sales channel for our partners,” says Konopka. “Our customers can use software from many providers without separate licenses, which wasn’t possible before.” 

Konopka envisions using a software as a service–business model in which hospitals can try new partner solutions without making long-term service commitments. Siemens Healthineers partners will deliver new product innovations faster, and thus the company will have more products to sell to its customers. 

Delivering microservices

The Kubernetes-based architecture of the teamplay digital health platform allows Siemens Healthineers to add new application components to its software without revising entire applications. That means it can create new microservices quickly. With Azure Arc, it can push these microservices in near real time to all connected applications in the cloud or at the edge. 

During the COVID-19 crisis, Siemens Healthineers created an application component that reveals the effects of the disease on the lungs. It would normally have taken a couple of years to gain regulatory approval and roll this service out to customers, Konopka says. But because the software component could stand on its own, Siemens Healthineers achieved approval faster and deployed the service to cloud customers in less than four months. 

Siemens Healthineers did not have Azure Arc at that time, but says the platform would have made deployment even more efficient, and would have allowed Siemens Healthineers to deploy critical updates in minutes. “With Azure Arc, delivery would have been faster,” Konopka says. “After the service was connected, anyone who wanted it, including edge customers, would have gotten it right away.” In the future, the company will use Azure Arc to improve delivery of other new services to its customers. 

Siemens Healthineers currently has more than 6,000 customer sites that have connected edge machines to the teamplay digital health platform. Konopka believes that with Azure Arc, the company will be able to extend this service to more than 20,000 additional customers, providing them with a highly secure connection, real-time maintenance, and access to instant updates for their on-premises equipment, as well as new microservices that Siemens Healthineers and its partners are developing. The company will also be able to onboard new customers more easily and scale its products faster. 

“Azure Arc is a game-changer for us,” says Gossler. “It gives our customers choices and enables the continuous delivery of Kubernetes workloads from the cloud to the edge, at scale and as a service.” 

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