Merten Slominsky (Chief Revenue Officer, LOGEX)

Can you explain your job to a five-year-old? 

With pleasure! That’s easy! We make hospitals smarter. 

Hospitals are there to make us well again when we are ill or injured. Many people have to work together to achieve this. It also requires many things, such as medication, treatments, perhaps tests, and even operations. It can get quite complicated when everything has to be coordinated in a hospital. It doesn’t always work perfectly. It’s difficult for one person or a team to keep a clear overview of everything and to know which of two possible treatments is best for a patient. This is exactly where we at LOGEX can help. We have developed great computer programs that help people to get a good overview and can show them where we can change things so that patients get better even faster.

What excites you most about your job?

Being able to work and contribute in an area with innovation and making a difference to the most important value chain that exists: our health. Data analysis in this context is almost magical when you get to grips with it. By analyzing healthcare data, you can suddenly see things that you couldn’t see before. Sometimes it only takes a few clicks and you see patterns and have answers to the question: Why does an operation or a patient journey work absolutely smoothly in one department and not in another? Why do some hospitals spend twice as much money for the same clinical outcome? Data analysis also helps you to look further ahead, anticipate developments, and plan strategically. This is enormously important for safe and high-quality care—especially in times when resources and staff are scarce. The fact that we can do this and thus help people, medical staff, and patients across Europe is very exciting.

Which trend will change the future of medicine? 

One quick glance at LOGEX’s work, for example, in the Netherlands or Finland, where healthcare has been highly digitalized for years, shows me all of the possibilities of digitization and data analytics. It is exhilarating for me to see how we are positioned perfectly to lead this digital transition in my native Germany in the right direction. Not just to become more digital, but to use the data for insights that make both the delivery of care more efficient, and the quality

of the outcomes better. There is a big push to unify the way in which we capture and encode healthcare data across Europe, for instance through the EHDS program. This will drastically improve benchmarking possibilities across Europe.

This, combined with AI capabilities improving, will drastically improve the possibility to discern subtle patterns in patients and care paths. This will bring us closer to optimal healthcare and the fastest possible delivery of that optimal healthcare so much faster than we had ever anticipated. This means that healthcare will become more personalised and yet, much easier and quicker to provide.

Which MedTech initiative or startup deserves more attention? 

There are a great many smart people and solutions out there—like AI-assisted diagnostics, nano-medicine, bioprinting, remote and self-diagnostics—some of which are very spectacular. Then there are healthcare solutions that are more administrative and financial in nature—not exactly premium clickbait material at first glance. Modern accounting programs and process optimization tools, benchmarking solutions for hospitals, for example. At the end of the day, however, it is precisely these tools that form the foundation for successful hospital management and the best possible healthcare provision. I think that this is sometimes somewhat

underestimated in the public image. But we’re working on making sure it doesn’t stay that way.

Where would you put a million dollars? 

All my faith is in the combination of real-world healthcare data and AI. We will work on getting everyone on board with sharing their aggregated data for the goal of optimizing healthcare.

What's the best advice you've ever received? 

Do what you say you do. And do everything you do with energy and passion.