We pioneer breakthroughs in healthcare. For everyone. Everywhere.

The past 18 months have been challenging both for the world as a whole and, above all, for the countless people working in often-overburdened healthcare systems. I’m profoundly grateful for and proud of the way in which our team has supported medical staff across the entire COVID-19 care continuum, helping to keep day-to-day healthcare on its feet. Our antigen self-tests have helped society take another step toward opening back up.

This period has been marked by rapid development for our company. Following the combination of Siemens Healthineers and Varian, we now have over 66,000 employees in 75 countries – and our employees are united in their commitment to our jointly formulated corporate purpose: “We pioneer breakthroughs in healthcare. For everyone. Everywhere.” This purpose forms the basis of our culture and strategy and is the benchmark against which we want to be judged. It’s what gets us up in the morning, drives us every day, and keeps us up at night.

In order to achieve our own self-imposed ambition and be there for as many people as possible, we’re launching the next chapter of our Strategy 2025 a year earlier than planned. Under the name of “New Ambition,” this chapter is an ideal vehicle for the unique capabilities we’ve built up and expanded systematically over recent years. Our aim is to enable every patient to receive precisely the medical treatment they need – in the most individual and precisely targeted manner possible. With this in mind, the following three core capabilities are central for us:

• Patient Twinning aims to describe the individual characteristics of each patient as precisely as possible so that – if need be – the next step in treatment can be tailored to the individual, including with the help of simulations. Thanks to a constant process of innovation in medical imaging and laboratory diagnostics, we’re edging closer to the idea of creating a “digital twin” of the patient.
•  Precision Therapy adapts the latest technology precisely to the situation and needs of the individual patient. Robots help physicians navigate catheters through blood vessels in the heart or brain with submillimeter accuracy. High-precision radiotherapy targets tumors and preserves healthy tissue as far as possible.
• Digitalization, Data, and Artificial Intelligence allow the first two capabilities to be linked up with a view to delivering exactly the right treatment for precisely the patient in question. They assist physicians with diagnosis and treatment planning. They help to minimize errors and reduce variations in care. Digitalization helps to scale technologies up. Accordingly, the patient benefits from a course of treatment that has proven successful in many similar cases – and knowledge is transported to where the patient is being treated, rather than the other way around.

With these capabilities, we help our customers not only to manage cost pressure but also to bridge the shortfall in specialist medical personnel. Ultimately, we help to make the system smarter and more efficient. Technology also helps to enable access to high-quality care for each of the around three billion people who have so far been excluded from healthcare provision. Digitalization allows us to bring medical expertise to places where there are no physicians.

Our “New Ambition” also underlines our commitment to sustainability, which is enshrined in our corporate purpose: We contribute to improving quality of life by enabling better access to healthcare and innovation. By 2025, we want to increase the total number of patient touchpoints in underserved countries by more than a quarter. At the same time, we’re conscious that good healthcare is always the result of a team effort, which is why we’re active in numerous collaborations of various types. We’re particularly proud of the many long-term strategic partnerships we’ve forged with our customers. One example of this international discourse is our regular participation in the World Health Summit in Berlin. In the future, we also hope to share our experiences as a partner to the World Economic Forum.

We’ve reached several significant milestones in recent months, including the combination with Varian, our inclusion in the DAX, and the presentation of the world’s first CT scanner with a photon-counting detector. We very much appreciate the recognition that was given, but we remain fully focused on leveraging our unique combination of capabilities to support even more customers and patients in the future. We see this not only as an opportunity, but also as our responsibility. With a view to developing ourselves further as an organization, we’re focusing on five growth vectors that were drawn up by a team of some 100 current and future leaders from across the company:

We’re helping our customers to provide more patients with better care (1) as well as relieving the burden on medical staff by digitalizing and networking manual workflows. This not only allows better use of resources but also paves the way for improvements in efficiency and a reduction in unwanted variations in treatment.

Around three billion people lack access to basic medical care – that’s about 40 percent of the world population. It’s both a privilege and a duty for us, as one of the drivers of innovation in medical technology, to make healthcare accessible to more people all over the world (2) – and we’re therefore working to take tried-and-tested local solutions and grow them into a global business. Among other things, we’ve resolved to become an even stronger partner to the Chinese healthcare system and its patients (3).

At the same time, we’re keen to contribute to the fight against some of the world’s most threatening diseases, as it’s precisely here that our core capabilities come into play. In oncology (4), we want to further expand our leading position by increasingly integrating diagnostics and therapy and establishing new forms of treatment – for a world without fear of cancer. In cardiovascular and neurovascular care (5), we’re building upon our strong position in image-guided therapies and precision robotics to provide an ever-greater number of patients with access to new, minimally invasive therapies.

Our core capabilities and growth vectors describe not only our strengths but also the areas that we gear them toward. Accordingly, they form the heart of our “New Ambition” – the next chapter of our Strategy 2025 – as we work toward pioneering breakthroughs in healthcare, for everyone, everywhere.