The world of health tech is changing. With more care being managed outside the hospital, data intake continues to grow. 

Many health systems today have a myriad of niche systems, modalities, and devices with associated software that make managing this data challenging.

By viewing healthcare as a connected whole, Philips offers tools to help people live healthily and prevent disease, aid patients’ recovery at home and assist clinicians in making precision diagnoses and delivering personalised treatment.

The global leading health technology company aims to bring the vision of precision care to life in an evolving healthcare world.

It has set the goal of improving 2.5 billion lives by 2030 through health tech, including 400 million people in underserved communities.

“The rapid escalation of virtual care tools presents health and service providers with an opportunity to fundamentally transform the way people interact with healthcare,” says Roy Jakobs, Chief Business Leader Connected Care, Philips. “Now is the time to break down the remaining barriers between health analytics, care management, operations, and patient engagement. This will truly enable connected care and collaboration.”

Philips believes that to improve health outcomes, enhance patient and staff experiences and reduce the cost of care, organisations must adopt scalable, connected, secure informatics solutions across clinical and operational departments.

Virtual care in a post-pandemic world 

According to Jakobs, the three key priorities for virtual care in a post-pandemic world are: informatics and data integration to deliver healthcare anywhere, interoperable, secure IT networks, and the adoption of a cloud-based platform approach.

By monitoring patients from pre-admission through post-discharge, he believes healthcare providers can help keep patients in a more comfortable, lower-cost setting and better allocate resources according to risk.

“During the pandemic, our customers across the globe realised that with the right solutions, care doesn’t have to be defined by a place, but instead by the patient and their condition. The power is not in audio or video capabilities – it’s in the intelligence that comes with collecting, analysing and representing data for clinicians to use,” adds Jakobs.

Virtual care can help to improve efficiency while maintaining quality of care and optimising staff allocation and productivity through data-driven insights.  

Patient journey 

Philips is working collaboratively to help manage a patient’s entire journey as they transition through the system in a way that addresses the quadruple aim.

This means not only improving the patient’s experience of care, improving the health of the population and lowering healthcare costs, but also improving the healthcare workforce’s experience of providing care.

“Virtual care use skyrocketed during COVID-19 out of need, but these new solutions can be so much more than quick fixes,” continues Jakobs. “Making space for an entirely new way of delivering care is a complex problem. The solution lies in intelligent informatics that extend care beyond the walls of the hospital, ensuring the smooth and secure transfer of data, and equipping organisations with scalable, connected ecosystems.”

Philips aims to help healthcare IT leaders adapt and advance digital health transformation at defining moments in a patient’s journey. This, in turn, paves the way for precision care. 

“A health system built to be truly interoperable and secure is a health system that supports and secures a patient’s seamless journey across healthcare settings – and it’s one that can evolve to meet the changing needs of tomorrow,” concludes Jakobs. 

Building interoperable, future-proof solutions 

One of Philip’s recent initiatives has been the company’s Future Health Index (FHI) 2021 report, which features critical insights from 3,000 healthcare leaders across 14 countries. 

The findings published in May 2021 revealed how healthcare leaders – including executive officers, financial officers, technology and information officers and operations officers – are meeting the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, and where their current and future priorities lie. 

Almost 64% of healthcare leaders around the world reported they would continue to prioritise telehealth when it comes to digital health technology investments.

More than half (52%) of FHI surveyed informatics leaders said that, three years from now, their hospital or healthcare facility will need to invest in implementing predictive healthcare technologies to be prepared for the future and make them more agile. 

However, leaders cited difficulties with data management (53%) and lack of interoperability and data standards (45%) as the biggest barriers to digital health technology within their facility.

“The power of interoperable solutions is so much more than improving the quantity of data – it’s also about data quality to feed future innovation,” explains Jakobs. “By breaking down walls to siloed data and aggregating that data into lakes of actionable patient insights, doors to further innovation – such as artificial intelligence – can be opened up to help advance more confident clinical decision-making.”

Highlighting integrated informatics solutions

At the recent HIMSS21 Europe online conference, Philips addressed the ongoing challenges faced by the global healthcare industry, as it seeks to build momentum and create a longstanding digital framework.

Philips’ Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer, Shez Partovi, spoke on the key informatics themes of healthcare anywhere, digital transformation, business models, healthcare consumerisation and precision care.

Partovi shared the company’s vision on how digital transformation is driving the delivery of healthcare for more resilient systems.

At HIMSS21 Europe, Philips also showcased its clinical and operational expertise and innovations that foster collaboration and optimise workflows.

The solutions on display included acute patient management solutions to provide continuous patient monitoring and provide insights to care teams, the Philips diagnostic informatics suite which allows data curation at the point of care and virtual care telehealth solutions.

These innovations are designed to help clinicians and health system leaders improve health outcomes, patient and staff experiences and reduce the cost of care.     

For more information on Philips’ solutions showcased at the virtual HIMSS European conference, as well as to continue the conversation around Philips’ innovation in health informatics, visit the website here. Philips will also attend HIMSS 21, August 9-13 in Las Vegas, NV, USA.