Building secure connected and interoperable medical technology

The goal is to further develop platform components that enable secure and vendor-independent interaction between medical devices, edge infrastructures, cloud services and clinical applications.

For ZEISS Digital Innovation, the core focus is to:

• Further develop reusable software modules for medical device interoperability.
• Extend the existing SDC-based concepts toward additional clinical workflows and lab use cases leveraging similar standards like SiLA.
• Build data pipeline components that leverage structured data generated through standardized communication, creating valuable data foundations for data-driven use cases such as workflow optimization.
• Strengthen secure edge-cloud architectures for regulated healthcare environments.
• Advance privacy-preserving data processing, including anonymization and pseudonymization. 
• Develop workflow components that support clinical processes in OR, ICU, labs, patient monitoring and further care environments.
• Integrate the developed components into demonstrators that show how larger platform architectures can work in practice.

The second phase should therefore not only refine individual components, but also demonstrate how these components interact as part of broader architectures for connected medical technology.

ZEISS Digital Innovation contributes software engineering, platform architecture and practical implementation expertise from regulated healthcare and MedTech environments.
Our work will focus on:

• Developing and integrating modular platform components for connected clinical workflows and data ecosystems. 
• Extending interoperability concepts based on SDC, SiLA and related healthcare standards. 
• Designing workflow components that can support context-aware and automated clinical processes.
• Building demonstrators that combine device communication, edge processing, cloud services, data management and workflow logic.
• Evaluating how components can be transferred into scalable, reusable and regulation-oriented architectures.

A key ambition is to build on the Phase 1 demonstrator work and extend it toward additional parts of clinical workflows. This includes scenarios in operating rooms, intensive care, clinical labs, patient monitoring and endoscopy-related contexts, depending on the project setup and partner contributions.

In Phase 2, Philips and Ovesco become important partners in the project setup. Philips contributes expertise in patient monitoring, SDC and clinical medical device environments, while Ovesco contributes a capsule-based diagnostic use case and platform-related data usage scenarios.

ZEISS Digital Innovation will also continue to interface with secunet around secure edge gateway and platform concepts. secunet’s role will be focused around secure connection of medical devices to cloud infrastructures and trusted operation of cloud systems.

This partner setup strengthens the practical relevance of the second phase: it combines ZEISS Digital Innovation’s platform and software expertise with medical device know-how, cybersecurity expertise and concrete clinical application scenarios.

The intended result is a set of more mature, reusable and demonstrable platform components for connected healthcare environments.

The project aims to deliver:

• Advanced interoperability and data management components for medical and lab devices.
• Workflow modules for selected clinical scenarios. 
• Demonstrators for clinical workflows such as surgical workflows, capsule-based diagnostics and patient monitoring scenarios.
• Secure edge-cloud architecture patterns.
• Concepts for integrating device communication, workflow logic, data processing and privacy-preserving services.

For ZEISS Digital Innovation, this project strengthens our role as an implementation partner for secure, interoperable and workflow-oriented digital health platforms.