Siemens Healthineers Delivers Real-Time Healthcare Diagnostics With the Confluent Data Streaming Platform

Every day, millions of patients worldwide depend on Siemens Healthineers' advanced medical systems—from MRIs that detect life-threatening conditions to laboratory equipment providing critical diagnostic results. Behind these life-saving technologies lies a complex flow of data that determines equipment reliability, accuracy, and ultimately, patient outcomes. 

For Siemens Healthineers, connecting manufacturing systems with healthcare delivery required a fresh approach to data.  They needed to link factory production lines with medical devices deployed across hospitals globally, creating a seamless hybrid environment from manufacturing edge to cloud analytics, providing instant visibility and enabling maintenance before potential issues could affect patient care.

But this was hindered by disconnected systems that isolated important data in silos. Lengthy file transfers, manual handling, and periodic batch processing contributed to significant delays, sometimes pushing equipment insights back by weeks and preventing timely quality improvements.

Confluent provided the holistic data streaming platform that unified these disparate systems into a cohesive, real-time data network. 

What matters isn’t just the data, but the speed at which it drives action. Siemens Healthineers' teams can now predict maintenance needs days before equipment issues emerge, optimize manufacturing as it happens, and deliver more effective healthcare technology while significantly reducing data processing costs.

Fragmented Systems Hindering Healthcare Innovation

Providing advanced medical technology to hospitals and healthcare systems worldwide generates enormous amounts of critical data. 

While Siemens Healthineers could effectively capture manufacturing and device telemetry data, it was stored across disconnected systems with batch processing causing delays in analysis.

"Our data sources on the shop floors, production lines, and hospital-installed products required extensive processing,” explains Arash Attarzadeh, Solution Architect at Siemens Healthineers. “We had to store everything in different silos with substantial manual work involved. Preparing this data to bring it into our data warehouse was painfully slow."

Siloed processes meant manufacturing data remained isolated from equipment monitoring systems, limiting how Siemens Healthineers could use its data while increasing costs and technical complexity.

"This patchwork approach was holding us back from where we needed to go," says Scott Elfering, Head of Data Ingestion at Siemens Healthineers. "We had systems for handling database changes and batch processing, but we were missing real-time information.”

That's when Siemens Healthineers turned to Confluent...

Connecting Medical Equipment Across Global Healthcare Systems

The Confluent data streaming platform quickly became the central nervous system for Siemens Healthineers' real-time data operations, enabling seamless streaming between factory systems, hospital devices, and the cloud infrastructure.  This has been critical for real-time monitoring and proactive maintenance. 

Deploying Confluent Cloud on their existing Azure infrastructure, Siemens Healthineers used fully managed connectors to enable data streams flowing between factory equipment, SQL databases, SAP systems, and their Snowflake data warehouse. This choice aligned with their cloud strategy, using Azure's scalability, security, and global reach to support real-time data streaming across manufacturing facilities and hospital devices worldwide. By bridging legacy systems to cloud-based technologies, engineers previously occupied with file transfers could now focus on optimizing equipment performance and improving the diagnostic quality of their MRI and CT scans, as well as laboratory systems.

"Previously, hospitals sent data as zip files to FTP servers, which required manual processes to copy to Azure storage, extract, and load into Snowflake," explains Arash. "Now there's a secure, private connection where hospitals only need to whitelist specific IP addresses from their network."

Fully managed connectors not only saved 3-6 months in engineering time to design, build, test and maintain each connector, they also eliminate operational burden and risk for the team.  But importantly, this transformation enables near real-time monitoring of critical medical equipment and proactive maintenance scheduling. "Our engineers in different departments can monitor products remotely, and if there are any anomalies or maintenance needs, they can plan for that well in advance," says Arash.

Connected Systems and Enhanced Patient Care

By using the data streaming platform through Confluent, Siemens Healthineers transformed how they monitor and maintain critical medical equipment worldwide.

Detecting Manufacturing Defects in Real Time

In precision medical equipment manufacturing, catching defects immediately rather than during later testing can save enormous costs. 

Confluent’s MQTT connector integrates factory equipment performance information into a stream of dates, enabling operators to monitor production quality as it happens, rather than hours or days later.

"When drilling components for medical equipment, if the drill position is off-center and you catch that immediately, you prevent wasting expensive materials. That component with an incorrectly positioned hole would otherwise be scrapped—a significant cost when manufacturing precision medical equipment," said Scott.

For medical diagnostic equipment, where image quality directly impacts diagnostic accuracy, this level of manufacturing precision directly translates to better patient outcomes.

Reducing Costs With Shift-left Processing

A key innovation in Siemens Healthineers' data architecture is their implementation of "shift-left" processing using Confluent’s Apache Flink® offering. Rather than storing raw data and then processing it in their data warehouse, they now cleanse, transform, and enrich data upstream—while it's still in motion.

"We use Apache Flink to process our data before it reaches Snowflake, to avoid additional unnecessary costs,” explains Arash. "When we're talking about a data warehouse, it’s billions of data points in one table, and processing this data after storage is extremely expensive."

With shift-left processing through Flink, teams can now create different levels of data granularity from the same streams, something that would be prohibitively expensive in their data warehouse.

"Now, in Flink, our data is flowing continuously. We process it in time windows as it moves through the system," says Arash. "You can have your main data in one stream going to your data warehouse, but at the same time aggregate this data and send it downstream to another storage platform—it's a lot more cost-effective and efficient.”

For a company managing thousands of medical devices globally, these efficiencies translate to millions in saved computing costs while improving monitoring capabilities through smarter data processing. 

Better Patient Care Through Connected Systems

At Siemens Healthineers, data isn't just about efficiency or cost savings—it's about the patient receiving a diagnosis that could change, or even save, their life.

By unifying data flows through Confluent, Siemens Healthineers has transformed how their diagnostic equipment performs throughout its lifecycle. Manufacturing quality improvements directly translate to more reliable scan results, while remote monitoring ensures calibration remains precise between service visits.

"Confluent has enabled us to replace manual processes with automated data flows," Scott explains. "This allows our engineers to focus on equipment performance rather than data movement. The result is more reliable diagnostic equipment and better healthcare outcomes."

For Arash, the human impact is paramount: "In healthcare, human lives depend on accurate information. When an MRI is used to plan radiation therapy or surgical interventions, precision isn't optional—it's essential."

What's Next for Siemens Healthineers and Confluent?

In the future, Siemens Healthineers looks to explore even more advanced applications, like  integrating artificial intelligence with their data streaming platform.

"We're now feeding equipment performance data into AI systems that can detect incredibly subtle patterns that humans might overlook. For example, subtle changes in MRI magnet performance that could indicate future calibration issues."

For Siemens Healthineers, Confluent isn't just solving today's data challenges, it's enabling the next generation of intelligent diagnostic systems that combine manufacturing precision with AI-enhanced analysis.