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Shaping the future of healthcare with smart hospitals

Southeast Asia’s population is ageing rapidly. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the proportion of people aged 60 or above is expected to increase from 9.8 per cent in 2017 to 13.7 per cent and 20.3 per cent by 2030 and 2050, respectively.

As the number of elderly increases, demand for health services will increase. Though the COVID-19 pandemic was a major accelerant for technology adoption across acute care environments, more needs to be done across all healthcare services and departments.

In Zebra Technologies’ latest Global Healthcare Vision Study, 85 per cent of decision-makers surveyed reported that their hospital accelerated the use of technology due to the pandemic and is increasing investments in mobility, location, and automation solutions.

This underscores the need for the healthcare sector to accelerate digital transformation efforts to maintain quality of care and alleviate the burden on the healthcare system.

As pointed out by my colleague, Rikki Jennings, Chief Nursing Informatics Officer, Zebra Technologies, the goal is to develop smarter, more connected hospitals to encourage enhanced communication, agility, transparency, and resiliency to succeed even in times of uncertainty.

Hospitals in the region can look at effectively harnessing technologies to increase operational visibility, real-time intelligence, expanded clinical mobility, and virtual collaboration in a modern healthcare delivery system.

Equipping clinicians with real-time intelligence

In a fast-paced hospital environment, every minute counts.

For clinicians to keep up with increased demand without compromising the quality of patient care, clinicians must have the ability to access healthcare assets and patient data anytime, anywhere.

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As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to develop, technologies that were once considered too complicated, like radio frequency identification (RFID) and real-time location systems (RTLS), are becoming more accessible.

75 per cent of decision-makers surveyed plan to implement location technologies to track the movement of staff, patients, and equipment, along with the availability of rooms and supplies, to achieve an optimised information ecosystem in the hospital.

This will improve operating room and emergency room orchestration, automate patient flow according to needs, and free up staff to provide quality and optimised care for each patient.

Enhanced mobility for better support

Clinicians need powerful devices in hand to share patient data and to connect with care team members within and outside of the hospital. 55 per cent of clinicians surveyed in Zebra’s study say connecting hospital systems for better communication between workers is a top challenge.

Enhanced mobility could be the solution to facilitating smoother and more efficient communication, with 87 per cent of clinicians and executives surveyed agreeing that the quality of patient care will improve with access to collaboration tools and healthcare applications.

This allows all clinical staff to be almost equally equipped to support patients across all hospital operations and healthcare delivery levels.

Hospital leaders understand that every staff member must be reachable, responsive, and able to report the status of their tasks if hospitals want to manage the supply chain better, orchestrate room turnover logistics, ensure accurate billing, and more.

At least seven in 10 executives say they plan to extend mobile device implementations to nearly every department in the next year, including IT, housekeeping, patient transport, supply chain/inventory management and food services. Employees will be provided with hospital-owned devices specifically for clinical environments with healthcare applications.

This will be welcomed news for employees, as mobile devices purpose-built for healthcare give clinical and non-clinical staff the necessary functionality to tackle the task without compromising cybersecurity or patient privacy.

These devices can also withstand the constant cleaning and disinfecting required to help reduce the risk of diseases, which is a concern among clinicians and hospital executives.

The age of virtual collaboration and communication

The disruptive nature of the pandemic made it clear that everyone in the global healthcare community needs a way to communicate with those inside and outside the four walls effectively. They must also be able to coordinate actions across disparate care teams.

For example, physicians and nurses must be able to consult with other clinicians who are physically distanced, update more electronic health charts, issue more prescriptions and process more lab tests while providing quality care to each patient.

Also Read: The emergence of telehealth in post-COVID-19 Southeast Asia

Team communication plays a key role in inpatient care. Equipping each front-line staff member with a clinical mobile device is the first step in pursuing a new level of efficient inpatient care.

Forward-thinking hospital decision-makers are also exploring ways to make operations more predictive rather than reactive by turning to innovative technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and prescriptive analytics.

For example, AI-powered health devices can help staff remotely monitor and react to patients by checking and reporting vitals regularly and sending alerts to clinicians’ mobile devices immediately when something is wrong.

Singapore is one of the countries in Southeast Asia actively exploring AI in the healthcare sector under the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, with a vision to apply AI to disease predictions and care plans by 2030.

As reported in Zebra’s study, improving patient communication also remains a top goal of many hospitals, focusing on the growth of telehealth and remote patient tracking systems.

Particularly in Southeast Asia, telehealth demand has surged during the pandemic and is expected to rise further as consumers and providers seek ways to safely access and deliver healthcare. The online health sector in the region is expected to grow 10 times by 2025, with Indonesia and Singapore as the main markets, accounting for 50 per cent to 60 per cent of the growth.

Smarter, more connected hospitals are the future of healthcare. Unexpected global developments such as the pandemic have only accelerated the evolution of healthcare ecosystems.

As hospitals embrace technological innovations, they must ensure they are plugged into the right information systems, connected, and working together as a cohesive ecosystem to better manage their resources, especially given the demand to automate the orchestration of high traffic areas in hospitals.

More data-led intelligence and streamlined workflows will enable nurses, doctors, and non-clinical staff on the front lines to deliver quality patient care while allowing hospital operations to be more straightforward and intuitive.

Check out this space to learn more about the technology strategies and solutions that can help hospitals become more intelligent, automated, agile, and resilient.

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