Dräger to launch 6 new products at Arab Health 2020 
According to Koen Paredis, Dräger’s Managing Director for Middle East, Africa, 2020 is an exciting and important year for the company. “At Arab Health, we are going to launch six new products to the Middle Eastern market. These launches will support in improving clinical outcomes, managing costs of care, enhancing patient experience and ensuring staff satisfaction.”

Excerpts:

1. Give us a brief about yourself. How did you come to work in healthcare? 
My name is Koen Paredis, Managing Director for Middle East, Africa since 2015.
I’ve started my career with Dräger in 1980 as a Service Engineer in Belgium. I then moved into Product Management for Anaesthesia and various Marketing roles.
Before taking over the responsibility for the region Middle East, Africa I was the Managing Director for Dräger France. 

2. As an exclusive partner at Arab Health 2020, what different innovative products and solutions will you be bringing to the show? 
Dräger stands for “Technology for life”. We develop life-saving medical

equipment for high acuity areas. Everything we do is focused on Improving Acute Care to support our customers to improve their clinical outcome and patient experience while at the same time manage their cost of care and enhance staff satisfaction.
2020 is an especially exiting and important year for us. At the Arab Health we are going to launch six new products to the Middle Eastern market that further establish Dräger as Your Specialist in Acute Care.

The Atlan family of anesthesia machines and workstations and the new Babylog and Evita ventilators will be shown for the first time to our customers
at the Arab Health exhibition. With these exciting new products, we are truly taking the next step in Improving Acute Care!

3. Connectivity for better healthcare delivery is the theme of Arab Health this year. What would you say is the current impact of connectivity on the delivery of healthcare? 
Connectivity is a strong focus topic for Draeger. In our vision connected medical offer new system functionalities helping to drive the automation of therapy procedures. New applications such as remote control of medical devices or the availability of assistance systems to automate clinical workflow and processes help to solve current challenges many hospitals are facing in acute care. This is only possible when open network standards are applied so that medical devices can interact with each other. Service-Oriented Device Connectivity (SDC) is such an open standard and was globally approved in 2019 as part of the IEEE 11073 standards family. It defines a safe and secure web services-based architecture for distributed systems of medical devices and is dedicated to the advanced requirements of connectivity in high acuity environments such as the OR, ICU and NICU. 

4. What, according to you, are the opportunities available to healthcare and trade professionals who attend Arab Health? 
As just mentioned, in 2019 the new open standard for medical device connectivity was published. We believe in such an open standard concept as it enables us to bring Interoperability to the bedside. By networking medical devices and systems securely, we support clinical decision making by providing comprehensive patient data at the acute medical workplace. Assisting technologies allow us to automate clinical workflows, increasing the efficiency of patient care.

Think of the possibilities that such a network can offer in the future when all these medical devices are effortlessly collecting and communicating data throughout the system! And we aren’t talking about the distant future, this is the present, as we are taking the first steps towards this “connected” reality as we speak.

To us this trend is something we recommend to watch and if you want to learn more about the new international standard Service-oriented Device Connectivity (SDC) and what our vision is to apply this interoperability concept in Acute Care, I invite you to visit our booth and experience it first-hand!

5. Could you shed light on your future plans?
Arab Health offers manufacturers like us the opportunity to meet with our end-customers, not only from the Middle East, but more and more with global customers.
In 2020 it offers us the perfect platform to launch our latest products in anaesthesia and ventilation to the market.

2020 is a very exciting year for us.  One of our highlight activities will be our roadshow “Innovations on Tour”. Our 50 sqm mobile Dräger showroom will be on tour through the GCC countries throughout 2020. We will visit hospitals and trade shows and bring our latest product innovations, which are shown at Arab Health, directly to the customers.

The successful combination of new technological developments and our specialist knowledge, provides for a great forum to engage with our customers during the tour. We can present new product innovations to them and answer questions they might have.

When visiting our mobile showroom, the customers can expect fresh input and new concepts for their daily challenges as well as hands-on sessions in which questions can be asked directly to our product experts.

6. Anything else you would like to add?

Thank you for the questions. I am looking forward to welcoming you at our booth.