Digitising and automating Smart Hospitals for greater clinical outcomes

The digitisation of healthcare is happening today at an increasingly accelerated pace. The demands and stress placed on the healthcare system through the pandemic and the increasing backlog of elective surgeries, increased complexity of care and a higher level of COVID-safe compliance requirements are driving hospitals and health service operators to consider new models of care.

The focus is now on automated, digitised and smarter healthcare environments that have given rise to hospitals that are hyper-connected and sustainable, providing a platform for future innovation and embedded intelligence. Hospitals need to know how to architect for a platform that supports smart and intelligent services

This future of a smarter and more connected hospital was the topic of conversation for an Executive round table discussion hosted by Optus and Cisco. The conversation contemplated and provoked thought on how hospital facilities need to evolve to meet ever-increasing demands, increased complexity and a challenging fiscal environment.

Hospitals need to be hyper-connected, sustainable, intelligent and resilient

The case for a Smart Hospital is built around three core outcomes:

• The need for digitised clinical functions and data-sharing to deliver improved clinical outcomes
• Management of clinical, infrastructure and cyber risk
• Cost optimisation through improved staff productivity and better utilisation of hospital space and assets.

Image credit: ipopba on Adobe Stock

The event was hosted in Optus’ FutureNow space in Sydney with invited speakers and representatives from a number of Australia’s leading hospitals and health care networks.

Three major insights came through in the discussion:

• Hospitals need to be more dynamic in the way they are designed. COVID-19 demonstrated that we need our bricks and mortar facilities to be responsive to changing conditions, whether that be turning general wards into intensive care facilities or converting carparks into testing facilities. Making hospital infrastructure more adaptive is more about having the right technology and platforms in place rather than the physical design of facilities.
  
  
• Automation is going to be critical to managing increasingly complex hospital environments. Whether it be improving navigation for patients, monitoring air quality or keeping track of medical assets, hospitals must improve the quality of their underlaying technology platforms and take advantage of opportunities to exploit technologies such as IoT, 5G and Software-defined networks.
  
  
• Hospitals need to be more data-driven if they are to become patient centred. There is a significant amount of data that we could be capturing in hospitals that we aren’t currently utilising, ranging from how patients and staff move around hospitals, to how spaces are utilised and how to take the friction out of the end-to-end experience of visiting or being admitted to hospital.
  

The impact of smart hospitals has the potential to deliver significant cost savings in proportion to national overall annual healthcare expenditure with an ability to combine and connect technologies helping to realise new value that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Investment in smart hospitals is generally anchored by a combination of clinical, cost, risk and operational benefits, which remain critical to hospital’s clinical objectives.

These insights are among many that were uncovered by independent research commissioned by Optus and Cisco and synthesised in the attached report.