Consulting Services
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Vector and Siemens present healthcare experiencesToday's business environment in healthcare is characterized by an increasing rate of innovation and integration of systems across the healthcare continuum (e.g. Siemens Healthcare being the premier integrated healthcare Company). Such integration leads for a healthcare provider (e.g. hospital) to a better cost position and higher quality of care for the patient. Another important factor is cost consciousness which translates for the Healthcare solution provider into a reduction of R&D costs – e.g. development of platforms, introduction of advanced software engineering methodologies and the optimization of life-cycle interfaces. Additionally, the amount of software content in medical devices (analog to the car industry) is growing and crucial to enable end-to-end medical workflows to provide the best medical care possible.
In order to successfully deal with such a business environment, organizations in the healthcare industry need to develop Requirements Engineering (RE) as a critical core competence to be able to develop the right products and solutions right. It is very clear e.g. that system platforms can only be developed having a very mature RE approach (process, methods, tools and skills) deployed. Dominating RE challenges enables a medical device manufacturer to bring the best possible healthcare solutions at the best value to the market. Further, industry studies have shown that the cost for rework across the product life-cycle can be cut down by 30-50% by improving requirements engineering. Hence, Requirements Engineering is evolving into one of the most important competitive advantages for organizations in the healthcare industry.
In our presentation, the following lessons learned and related best practices from these projects together with the experiences of Siemens and Vector Consulting Services are covered:
- Use Storyboards to Systematically Capture Clinical Workflows
- Define Appropriate Feature Hierarchy and Dependency Relationships
- Obtain a Good Understanding of Customer/Market Requirements
- Develop Specifications for Problem and Solution Space
- Consistently Implement and Maintain Traceability
- Establish Effective RE standards and Review Processes