Update: HIMSS20 has been canceled due to the coronavirus. Read more here.

At HIMSS20, Philips (Booth 2701) will present its HealthSuite System of Engagement and debut new integrated artificial intelligence capabilities through the HealthSuite digital platform. The enhanced functionality is designed to help healthcare and life science organizations achieve set goals for realizing better health outcomes.

And Philips will debut in the U.S. its IntelliSpace Corsium, a web-based clinical dashboard focused on pre-hospital monitoring. Through its integration with Philips’ Tempus Pro, the system supports real-time rich data transfer and two-way communication to empower clinical decision making by emergency medical professionals. The system is designed to empower caregivers to focus on the patient and not be distracted or burdened by the equipment they need to use.

Pre-hospital monitoring in emergencies

“In emergency situations where seconds count, pre-hospital emergency medical professionals face both clinical and operational challenges in trying to address the needs of patients,” said Roy Jakobs, chief business leader, connected care, at Royal Philips. “Emergency caregivers regularly face unpredictable workloads in uncontrolled situations, while those transporting a critically ill patient must deliver intensive levels of care in challenging environments.”

At the same time, the role these care providers play today has fundamentally changed from what they once were, with the expectation that they will diagnose, treat and transport patients where necessary, he explained.

"The industry needs to provide flexible connected solutions that can evolve as the mission and requirements of EMS professionals change."

Roy Jakobs, Royal Philips

“With the unstable nature of this patient population, the demands on critical care teams and the equipment they use are high, but their equipment is not typically designed to support them in optimal ways,” he continued. “To date, the industry hasn’t evolved its solutions fast enough to meet the rapidly changing requirements, particularly in relation to flexibility of use and data acquisition.”

This is especially noticeable on monitors and defibrillators, which serve as key pieces of clinical, operational and capital equipment, he added.

Today’s technology does not cut it

“Today, these professionals are expected to carry more than 20 pound-monitors onto an incident scene and their present data collection is – at best – a snapshot of a 12-lead ECG,” he explained. “Coupled with an unreliable transmission that prevents data from crossing organizational silos, today’s technology and data are not enough to perform at the level needed.”

Enabling already overburdened emergency responders to carry less and to do more, more efficiently, is essential to helping achieve the quadruple aim of improved outcomes, enhanced satisfaction for caregivers and patients, as well as reduced costs, Jakobs contended.

“For these caregivers, the unpredictable nature of their work means the equipment carried and data collected plays a critical role in safeguarding the safety of both them and their patients,” he said. “Mobile data transfer – having the ability to livestream a patient’s physiology data with secure encryption from an incident scene in the air or on the ground – helps EMS professionals address the patient’s needs at the point of care, and helps receiving hospital teams give better remote medical advice and better prepare for the patient’s arrival.”

Such improvements to remote patient monitoring technology and secure data transfer can help emergency professionals provide care closer to home, avoid unnecessary transports, and better utilize resources, he said.

“The industry needs to provide flexible connected solutions that can evolve as the mission and requirements of EMS professionals change,” he said. “There is a real opportunity to automate documentation of care, but this requires reliable, secure communications, moving from today’s snapshot of an event to near real-time data capture.”

Artificial intelligence integration

On the AI front, Philips will be unveiling its AI integration in its HealthSuite System of Engagement product.

“Artificial Intelligence provides the tooling to realize transformative change in healthcare to address waste and improve clinical decision making and patient guidance,” said Jeroen Tas, chief innovation and strategy officer, at Royal Philips. “By harnessing this technology, we are able to draw insights and inferences from data, helping to address the most important challenges faced by healthcare providers.”

With the overall push to leverage AI to drive optimization of operational and clinical workflows and enhance clinical decision-making and care, Philips sees trends in AI that are top of mind for the company:

• Improved data quality and ingestion of contextualized, longitudinal data.
• Secure, cloud-based health data infrastructure.
• Stronger methods to train and validate algorithms.
• Better integration with clinical workflows and stronger feedback loops.

“Data privacy is a significant concern as data scientists require greater volumes of longitudinal, patient data for developing and testing algorithms,” Tas explained. “Consequently, there is push for de-identification services to remove identifying personal health information from patient records. During data preparation, data scientists strive to have improved methods for curating data – annotating and managing the data lifecycle – selecting well-defined cohorts to share with researchers and tracking consent, and data processing activities – all within an environment that complies with healthcare regulations.”

The AI development environment

For algorithm development, training and deployment, a development environment is required that supports collaboration, end-to-end traceability, easy deployment of algorithms, as well as advanced testing protocols, he insisted. The greater range of AI capabilities necessitates the creation of services that provide an end-to-end, traceable AI workflow with built-in feedback loops to continuously improve the efficacy of algorithms and completeness of data sets, he added.

"Artificial Intelligence provides the tooling to realize transformative change in healthcare to address waste and improve clinical decision making and patient guidance."

Jeroen Tas, Royal Philips

“Philips AI technologies are embedded into the operational clinical workflow to address hospitals greatest clinical and operational challenges,” he explained. “Our AI technologies span from proactive management of scanners to minimize downtime to improving departmental efficiency and quality by analyzing operational and report data to improving clinical reading workflow of AI algorithms whether they are our own or developed by a third party to clinical data annotation for improved consistency, and even harmonized management of AI algorithms from third-party vendors.”

Philips applies AI to offer products to securely ingest and manage healthcare organizations’ data, drive operational workflow and quality, and extract clinical insight, Tas said.

“Our AI-based solutions are bringing us closer to realizing the quadruple aim: improved experience for patients, better health outcomes, improved staff experience, and lower cost of care,” he concluded.

Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.