Siemens Shows Its U.S. Face
Barry Hieb, research director for Gartner's healthcare group, says Siemens has revamped Shared Medical since buying it and come out with a series of innovative IT management products that allow doctors and pharmacies to track patients more closely. But there's still a ways to go. "They've done OK," Hieb says, "though not as well as perhaps they had hoped." Now the challenge will be getting the company's huge existing customer base to adopt the new products, he says. The industry is fragmented at the moment, he notes, yet is showing some signs of wanting to converge around a single company that can provide clinical, financial, and administrative data management.
Another key move for Siemens was the $700 million purchase of Acuson, an independent maker of ultrasound equipment, in 2000. "They've acquired a number of key vendors in that very critical medical IT management space," says Antonio Garcia, medical imaging industry manager at Frost & Sullivan.
Speed reading. One fan of the company's integrated approach is Robert Grossman, who heads the radiology department at NYU Medical Center. The hospital has the latest Siemens imaging equipment, including the 64-slice CT scanner, and chose Siemens in a competition with GE for all of its imaging needs. "We really wanted to be the best department in the world," says Grossman, who waxes poetic about the scanner. "The speed has enabled very new applications such as cardiac imaging. Now you can actually visualize the coronaries." That could directly improve outcomes. "For the first time," says Grossman, "the speed of the patient throughput is dramatically improved, and the image quality really enables better diagnosis."
Siemens is a dominant force in other industries, just as it is in medicine. Lighting, for instance: Three out of every four cars on U.S. roads have the company's lighting components. In communications, Siemens provides the backbone for many of the world's land-line telephone systems and also is the top global provider of telephone-based equipment for high-speed Internet access.
With such a broad portfolio of businesses, it might seem difficult for U.S. CEO Nolen to maintain an umbrella strategy that encompasses all of them. But he visualizes Siemens in a rather simple fashion: "We are an electrical engineering company with very advanced software," he says. One whose name might eventually be as commonplace in the United States as its products.
SIEMENS USA
Headquarters: New York City
CEO: George Nolen
Revenues: $16.6 billion in 2004
Main businesses: Medical systems, lighting, light rail, power generation, automotive parts, water filtration, and airport lighting and security
Employees: 70,000
Research and development: $ 800 million spent in the U.S. in 2004
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