About vitagroup HIP

Our initial vision was to save the lives of heart patients with a combination of an ECG device and a mobile phone. vitaphone GmbH was founded in Mannheim, Germany, in 1999 and began developing the Herzhandy (or “heart mobile phone” in English). When others were not even talking about digitalisation yet, we were already delivering it. We found our first investor in 2000: Dr Hans-Werner Hector, co-founder of software company SAP. Excited by the idea of digitally supported telemedicine, he decided to become an investor in order to help the company unlock the potential of digitalisation for the healthcare sector and harness its power to benefit people.

With all technology, the human factor is vital. The foundation of vitaservices GmbH & Co. KG in Chemnitz, Germany, in 2004 marked the establishment of our first telemedicine service centre. Today, more than 200 medical staff with over three million interactions per year support patients in Germany’s most innovative telemedicine centre under vitagroup’s second division, Health Dialog.

Further companies were founded, developing innovative products that became established on the market. In 2006, the increasing amount of technology and data from the programmes and solutions created so far led to the foundation of vitasystems IT Development. Today, it is the supplier and beating heart of our open system architecture.

With numerous companies in Germany and farther afield as well as a multitude of innovations and products on the market, the time had come to strategically consolidate all group activities: vitagroup AG was founded in 2016 with headquarters in Mannheim and Munich.

The acquisition of Braunschweig-based symeda GmbH in 2018  was a key step in vitagroup’s growth strategy. As part of vitagroup, symeda develops e-health solutions that network medical, therapeutic, and nursing experts for patient-centred care in order to make data available in an interoperable way, regardless of vendor. Customers include hospitals, health insurers, management companies, and networked institutions. Many thousands of users access symeda systems every day.

From this point on, all of the vita units and companies established and acquired over the years will operate under the vitagroup brand, of which symeda is now also a part.

In the face of the unprecedented coronavirus pandemic, vitagroup has proven itself as a systemically relevant healthcare service provider in Germany — whether through the development and adaptation of the SORMAS epidemic management system for our health boards, the creation of the NUM CODEX research platform for our university hospitals, or the operation of the 116117 on-call service.

When it developed the EHRbase open-source instance in 2020, vitagroup also received considerable international acclaim for achieving a milestone in healthcare system networking.

With all of the experience gained through this and other important steps, vitagroup is today ideally positioned to play a leading role as a driving force in the increasingly dynamic healthcare market.

At the core of vitagroup’s growth story is the Health Intelligence Platform, or HIP for short. Our vision behind this was to develop a central data platform that would separate health data from applications so that it would be accessible to health institutions, researchers, health regions, and e-health providers, regardless of vendor.

The role of vitagroup in the market is also becoming increasingly clear. vitagroup has now been organised into two business divisions: Health Intelligence Platform (HIP) and Health Dialog (HD). These represent two completely different approaches that the company takes to meet the needs of the market. With its HIP division, vitagroup is a technology enabler, and with its Health Dialog division, a healthcare service provider.

This organisational separation and focus on the two business divisions now give both divisions the necessary space to develop and flourish independently of each other.

Today, vitagroup’s HIP is playing a leading role in the market, with the Health Intelligence Platform Clinical Data Repository (HIP CDR) at its core. The HIP CDR stores health data according to open standards and in a fully interoperable way. Data is separated from applications for use in all systems without any conversion. For example, hospitals are perfectly prepared to meet all interoperability requirements — such as those contained in the German Hospital Future Act (KHZG) — with the HIP CDR. What’s more, the HIP CDR eliminates persistently high costs due to complex interfaces as well as dependence on software vendors.

For better healthcare, better prevention, and better diagnosis.

And most importantly, for better health.

vitagroup — Health Intelligence