Thomas Dechant thinks Cleveland, Ohio where he lives, and Vienna, where he’s from, are actually pretty similar. “The Cleveland Browns are like the Austrian soccer team. They don't win very often but sometimes they surprise you. Like Vienna, Cleveland went through a lot of transitions – it was a steel city once and is a healthcare hub now. Also, the people here like to raunzen. So, from that perspective, I feel it is kind of similar and therefore it’s a good fit for me.”
Dechant began his career as a software developer in Vienna, where he joined Siemens in 1984. Today he still works there as a software architect in the Healthcare division. After working in Germany for a few years in the early 2000s, he became part of a project for Cleveland Clinic, one of the top hospital systems in the US. This is the project that brought Dechant to Ohio.
Dechant’s team developed a program that gave referring physicians access to digital radiology images along with test results and medical reports. This additional available information improves patient management and makes it easier, for example, for surgeons to plan procedures. Currently, Dechant is working on a different project that has to do with digital imaging and reporting for cardiologists. It also takes into consideration the more significant role AI is playing in healthcare today.
“What we are trying to do is make the work of the physician more efficient,” he said. “Physicians are under time and cost pressure and are supposed to see more patients per hour than in the past.”
The AI component automates tasks that are normally time consuming for the physician, for example measuring blood vessels in the heart. “The idea is that the diagnosis still comes from the physician, but the data on which the diagnosis is based are obtained automatically,” Dechant said.
Dechant plans to continue making his footprint in healthcare from his home in Ohio. Although he originally planned to stay in the US for only two years, life had other plans. Dechant met his wife in Cleveland, and he now considers it his home base.
Although he sees Vienna and Cleveland as somewhat similar, the Ohioans Dechant meets sometimes have a narrower picture of Austria.
“On occasion when you say you are Austrian, people think you play the violin and were hired by the Cleveland Orchestra. That’s happened to me three times,” he said. This could be because classical music is important in Cleveland and the current music director of the Cleveland Orchestra is Austrian conductor Franz Welser-Möst.
