Philips has recently presented its vision in a position paper “The smart hospital of the future is a hospital without walls”, and recently a brief version the company’s blog.
The delivery of healthcare in hospitals will increasingly move to the home and community as technology advances. Hospitals will continue to play an important role in the future distributed healthcare system. Using smart technologies, they can provide the highest level of acute and specialist care to the sickest and most complex patients. Using data, AI, and IoT in combination with human-centered design, hospitals can improve operational efficiencies, deliver clinical excellence, and create seamless patient experiences.
Hospitalization is the last thing any patient wants. Nonetheless, they want their experience to be frictionless, comfortable, and reassuring, with the least amount of waiting and delay possible. The purpose of physicians and hospital staff is to deliver the best possible care to patients without getting bogged down in administrative duties or having to manually gather patient records.
Philips envisions, inter alia:
“In the smart hospital of the future, we will see more and more wireless patches – or even contactless, light-based sensing – enabling ubiquitous patient monitoring throughout the hospital. Mobile connected devices will reduce dependency on bedside equipment, making care teams more flexible to move around as needed. Avatar-based monitoring can further reduce cognitive load by integrating patient data in a highly visual way, providing an at-a-glance overview of their health status. All of this will be supplemented by remote guidance and mentoring from highly trained specialists in centralized hubs; a model that has already proven its value through tele-ICUs, and which could also support staff in lower-acuity areas such as the general ward.”
Read the full vision here