Smart Healthcare Technologies And European Health Insurance Integration – As healthcare becomes increasingly digital, much of the care provided in hospitals today will be transferred to the home and community. At the same time, hospitals will continue to play a key role in the distributed healthcare system of the future, leveraging intelligent technology to provide the highest levels of acute and specialty care for the sickest and most complex patients. By combining the power of data, AI, and IoT with human-centered design, hospitals can increase operational efficiency, deliver superior clinical service, and create a seamless patient experience both inside and outside the hospital. No patient wants to end up in the hospital. But when they do, they want their experience to be as frictionless, comfortable and reassuring as possible, with as little wait and delay as possible. As far as doctors and hospital staff are concerned, they want to focus on providing the best possible patient care without getting bogged down in administrative duties or having to piece together patient data manually. The reality is that despite impressive advances in medical innovation, hospital care today is often plagued by disjointedness and inefficiencies that prevent optimal experiences and outcomes. Information overload is a major concern, with 55% of healthcare leaders in the 2022 Future of Health Index report expressing concern that their workforce will be overwhelmed by the amount of data available [1]. This data is often locked up in silos, hindering the ability to use them effectively. Burnout among healthcare professionals continues to rise, with too much administrative work being the main culprit [2]. Hospital leaders are faced with a growing shortage of qualified staff and rising rates of burnout, prompting them to consider how to improve staff retention and satisfaction [3]. Inefficiencies can also have financial costs when hospitals are operating on thin margins. For example, in the United States, an estimated 25% of healthcare spending is wasted due to issues such as delayed hospital discharges, poor care transitions, and poor asset management [4]. At the same time, patients are looking for easier ways to schedule hospital appointments and access health data generated across care settings. In fact, 95% of patients aged 18-34 said they would switch providers if the digital experience did not meet their expectations [5].
Faced with these challenges and demands, hospitals that embrace the full possibilities of digital transformation will be best positioned to deliver an exceptional care experience and outcomes, while eliminating process inefficiencies, helping healthcare professionals work at their best and Rediscover happiness. in their work. Governments around the world also recognize the need to modernize hospital care. In Germany, for example, the Future of Hospitals Act, which came into force in 2020, has provided €4.3 billion in funding for new digital hospital infrastructure and initiatives. Countries such as China, Japan and Singapore are also investing heavily in IoT technology, artificial intelligence and robotics to improve the quality of hospital care and ease staffing shortages. So, what exactly makes a hospital smart and future-proof? As we envision, a smart hospital intelligently connects people, data, and technology to (1) improve operational efficiency, (2) enhance clinical excellence, and (3) create a seamless patient experience before, during, and after visits Experience – All of these need to be supported by (4) new capabilities to create a culture of continuous innovation and improvement. In this article, we’ll focus on the first three, since the fourth has its own article.
Smart Healthcare Technologies And European Health Insurance Integration

One of the biggest opportunities offered by smart technologies such as artificial intelligence is to automate many of the tedious, manual tasks that tire doctors and staff. By adding intelligence to medical systems and devices, they also become more accessible to less qualified staff, allowing hospitals to reduce their reliance on scarce specialists without compromising quality and patient safety. For example, in MR imaging, intelligent non-contact patient sensing technology can automatically check the correct patient position and monitor the patient’s breathing, enabling routine MR exam setup in under a minute, even for inexperienced operators . Help them keep an eye on patients. Additionally, the smart AI system can suggest the most appropriate protocol for each MR exam, speed up image acquisition, and automate exam planning, scanning, and processing. The purpose of such innovations is not to remove clinical and technical staff from circulation. Giving them actionable intelligence at their fingertips, along with solutions that are deeply embedded in their workflows and designed to empower them. That means less time figuring out device settings and more time interacting with patients.
Explainer: Everything You Need To Know About The European Health Data Space
Another common source of frustration and inefficiency that automation can help address is a lack of real-time insight into asset location and utilization. For example, more than one-third of nurses waste up to two hours per shift looking for lost medical equipment, such as ambulatory infusion pumps [6]. Solutions like track and trace — using physical tags combined with technologies such as WiFi, Bluetooth Low Energy, infrared or radio frequency identification — can help workers find the nearest device faster and provide insights into device utilization. Using such a real-time location system, a Dutch hospital successfully found that it could save 20% in asset search time and EUR 1 million in equipment investment based on more accurate utilization rates [7]. As a next step, real-time location data can be further enhanced with additional information about device status and utilization, which smart connected devices can transmit directly via WiFi. For example, when equipment needs repair or maintenance, automated work orders can be triggered in a hospital’s maintenance management system based on changes in equipment status and/or location, enabling a more streamlined workflow and reducing downtime. Real-time location tracking can also be used to track patients throughout their care, for example as they pass through the emergency department (ED). This can help answer questions like: How long do patients spend in the triage room? How long do they have to wait for the radiology test? Early pilots have demonstrated how such real-time information can be integrated with data from other hospital systems, such as electronic medical records, to help administrators manage patient flow in emergency rooms and optimize equipment and bed utilization [8]. Over time, these track-and-trace-like solutions will evolve into enterprise-wide IoT platforms that enable a central command center to manage the transition from one environment to another based on accurate real-time information about patients, beds, and equipment. Nursing transition in this setting. equipment. Combined with predictive analytics, this can help hospitals predict and prevent patient flow bottlenecks before they occur, reducing waits and delays across the hospital and ensuring timely discharge for home monitoring. Ultimately, we envision a smart hospital as a fully connected, intelligent system that can dynamically adapt to current conditions, enabling staff and equipment to be used where they are needed most – for example, when a disaster or local event occurs. Given the logistical challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, this will help hospitals become more resilient in the face of future crises.
Just as smart technologies can bring more insight, predictability, and efficiency to hospital operations, they can also help clinicians process increasing amounts of often disconnected patient data to support more integrated and efficient precision medicine. Diagnosis and care. Take cancer care, for example. As our understanding of cancer continues to improve, clinicians have access to more and more patient information, including a variety of medical images, pathology reports, genomics and molecular test results. Pulling all the information together manually can be time-consuming and error-prone. Working with clinical innovation partners such as Karolinska University Hospital in Sweden, we developed digital dashboards that automatically integrate patient information from different sources for collaborative decision-making. As a result, we were able to reduce the time spent on each patient case by 24% without compromising patient outcomes, thereby increasing the efficiency of multidisciplinary tumor board meetings at Karolinska University Hospital [9].
Likewise, in acute and post-acute care, we are investing heavily in patient care management solutions that can integrate data from a multitude of monitoring devices and then intelligently filter that data for clinical use. With more and more tasks constantly vying for attention, nurses and doctors don’t have time to scroll through tons of disparate data. They need timely and contextually relevant insights to act when it matters. For example, one hospital was able to reduce the number of serious adverse events in patients by 35% by pioneering the use of automated early warning scores to identify signs of deterioration in patients on general wards [10]. In the smart hospital of the future, we will see more and more wireless patches and even non-contact light sensing, enabling ubiquitous patient monitoring throughout the hospital. Mobile connected devices will reduce reliance on bedside devices, allowing care teams to move more flexibly as needed. Avatar-based surveillance can further reduce cognitive performance
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