The Future Of Health Care: Delivering Innovation With a Legacy Of Resilience
Robust, secure and resilient healthcare systems are at the core of ensuring hospitals can deliver tailored care to each and every patient. The country, however, is at a nexus for future care with an opportunity to seize the potential of interoperability, Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud computing and telehealth technologies to revolutionize the next generation of health systems.
Philips is meeting that future. With a storied history, a legacy of 100 years based on enriching the consumer experience, the company is embracing innovation to provide quality-at-scale healthcare systems optimized for efficiency and security. From expanding the VA’s capacity for health services to developing breakthroughs in new military technologies for care on the battlefield, Philips remains a vital partner delivering ingenuity to its U.S. government customers.
“Our corporate mission today is to improve the lives of 2.5 billion people by 2030 through meaningful innovation,” said Dr. Tom Dolan, Senior Director of Healthcare Integration Services at Philips.
No challenge has shed more light on the critical need to modernize healthcare systems than the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing to bear the vital importance of capabilities to support enhanced virtual care and telehealth services.
Jeroen Tas, Chief Innovation & Strategy Officer a Philips, points to the pandemic as a pivotal moment to embrace agile innovation to revolutionize healthcare beyond the walls of the traditional hospital.
“If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us one thing, it’s that we must continuously rethink and rework the way we do things. Agile innovation will be the new reality, with telehealth and virtualized care as a key domain,” Tas said. “It’s shown that resistance to change can be overcome when there’s a clear and present need to do so. That collaboration rather than competition helps resolve complex healthcare problems. That digitalization, data sharing and artificial intelligence – three key elements that underlie next-generation telehealth – can not only improve the patient experience by enabling precision, personal, predictive and proactive care, but also improve staff experiences through better resource allocation, more efficient workflows, and greater support and knowledge sharing.”
The pandemic presents an opportunity to build a stronger healthcare ecosystem that embraces a new approach to caregiving, extending capacity with remote monitoring and resilient audiovisual capabilities for robust telehealth services.
“What if hospitals could use connected devices and streaming data to monitor patients 24/7 from a virtual care center? What if we could combine personal medical data with socio-economic and behavioral data to predict health risk and potential deterioration? What if family, friends and the community could participate in care? The combined benefits to individuals, their families and to society at large would be enormous,” Tas said.
This work has already started, as Philips has worked with the University of Kentucky’s UK HealthCare to power the state’s only tele-ICU clinical command center, as well as partnering with The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) on a $100 million expansion of the department’s tele-critical care program.
“VA, in partnership with Philips, has developed a robust tele-critical care network that is way ahead of many other healthcare providers. Due to the success of its tele-critical program and improvements in veteran care, VA is doubling down and expanding[1] its tele-critical care capabilities to prepare for the future and further optimize care delivery,” Dolan said.
In addition, Philips is leveraging its industry leading design competence while collaborating with VA on a pilot program to design and deploy Virtual Care Stations to locations across the country. Bringing together veterans with their nurses and intensivists to deliver care beyond the inpatient hospital setting.
“Philips joined VA’s ATLAS[2] (Accessing Telehealth through Local Area Stations) program to assist in bridging the gaps in care delivery between the hospital and home. The partnership between Philips, VA, The American Legion, and Veterans of Foreign Wars began with ‘co-create’ sessions facilitated by Philips design consultants. We worked directly with veterans and VA representatives to design, build and now pilot private, functional Virtual Care Stations at Veteran Service Organization halls serving rural areas. It is enabling veterans, their care partners, and comfort animals to come to an area that they know well to tele consult with remote providers. This mitigates the geographic and technological access challenges that are often barriers to providing care to where it’s needed,” Dolan said.
Philips is also making critical investments in key technologies enabling the U.S. Department of Defense’s goals for bolstered care for active military personnel from the garrison to the battlefield. The company recently acquired Remote Diagnostics Technologies (RDT) and its Tempus Pro technology, a portable and rugged multi-parameter patient monitor that can be deployed in a wide range of clinical scenarios. Philips has also entered into a partnership with BioIntellisense, a continuous health monitoring and clinical intelligence company, to integrate its BioSticker™ wearable medical device into its Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM) offering. This will allow the monitoring of patients from hospital to home by regularly transmitting data that can provide critical insights into a patient’s condition.
“Philips and the Department of Defense have an aligned mission. Both are looking at all aspects of healthcare for active duty military personnel and their families across the continuum; from the key phases of health promotion through point of injury, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation across all care settings,” Dolan said.
With an eye towards the future, Philips is also making major investments in next-generation cloud based technologies to provide scale and to enable high-compute analytics.
Transition to the cloud has fostered further innovation by increasing the focus on cyber security and unlocking the full potential of AI. Security is a bedrock-principle of innovation processes and Philips offers consulting services to customers to help align their solutions with customer security architectures. Similarly, Philips’ targeted research and development investments in AI are paving the way for a future of healthcare that is optimized and efficient, offering patients unparalleled assurance that care providers have the best resources for diagnostics and treatment. These innovations are done in close collaboration with leading-edge clinical partners and other ecosystem-players. For example, Philips has recently partnered with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute to develop an AI-based therapy matching algorithm for cancer treatment.
“We’re making significant investments in Philips HSDP (HealthSuite Digital Platform) which is powering the next generation of connected cloud health applications. The HSDP platform facilitates the capture, digitization, analysis, and sharing of data in a way that supports a collaborative, federated caregiving model driven by actionable insights,” Dolan said.
Amongst all the new initiatives; however, one core element from the Philips legacy as a global industrial manufacturer is a commitment to standards-based interoperability. Philips remains focused on this principle to support customers in meeting their unique care requirements with plug-and-play capabilities. Perhaps even more importantly, this approach enables customers to avoid vendor lock-in, fosters component-level innovation and enables the ability to scale and evolve much more economically without the need for system-wide replacement.
“Philips has a strong track record of endorsing, defining and delivering standards-based interoperable solutions. Due to our focus on interoperability, customers such as the Department of Defense have the freedom to design and construct modular, multi-vendor, healthcare information platforms that allow the seamless flow and contextualization of patient data from the point of care to the enterprise level,” Dolan said. “This idea of multiple components that work together in an interoperable and vendor agnostic manner gives the U.S. government the ability to create flexible, robust, and sustainable informatics platforms across all agencies that can be further modernized through granular advancements in technology.”
As a leading provider of healthcare systems, Philips will continue leading the way on innovation towards further optimizing, securing and revolutionizing caregiving capacity. With a true commitment to extending care, creating efficient workflows and facilitating interoperability, Philips is poised to meet the future with a robust, holistic approach to health, wellness and safety.
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