Philips on digital health and how we can use it
There’s a major transformation taking place in the way we interact with and use healthcare technology, and digital devices are leading the way. Alan Davies, director of home healthcare for UK and Ireland, Philips explores this boom and its opportunities
No one will deny that the expansion of digital technology has grown rapidly in the last few years, nowhere more so than in the provision of health care. Wearable technology, telehealth services and the innovative use of 3D and 4D printing possibilities have all started making a positive impact on people’s health and wellbeing. Philips is also taking an active role in transforming healthcare through innovation and improved service design, and our experience in creating products for people across the whole health continuum has highlighted some interesting opportunities for increased collaboration within this transformative period.
A core impact of digital technology is that it makes data sharing quicker and easier. This is opening up opportunities for service and solution providers to become active partners with their clients not only in providing technical aspects of care service, but by being involved at a strategic level too. This is increasingly pertinent as the NHS Five Year Forward report highlights. It acknowledges that a growing population is putting increased pressure on public budgets but this can be alleviated by integrating intelligent technology widely into the healthcare system. Philips is committed to supporting this and, importantly, innovating collaboratively do drive up patient care.
A good example of how collaboration has enabled technology to spur innovation on a large scale is our partnership with the Liverpool Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG). In conjunction with the Liverpool CCG and a number of other organisations, industry and clinical service expertise came together and were able to explore new, innovative ways to use technology to help assist people with mobility difficulties. Public and private partners explored all aspects of assistive technology, from assessing how homes can be made easier to navigate to improving the ease with which GP appointments are made and patient data stored.
Dr Cees Van Berkel, principal scientist at Philips Research UK, summed up how important it was to collaborate when stating: “Telehealth has traditionally been seen as a patient monitoring tool following a hospital discharge, but by working in true collaboration with partners and GPs, we’ve managed to look at ways where telehealth can help in the primary care setting. Collaboration was essential to gaining the insights required and ensuring that what was suggested didn’t impede on the GPs’ roles and responsibilities but instead brought them into the mix from day one. The resulting ideas and services have consequently been widely championed in the region .”
This is a partnership model that Philips sees as the future and a key opportunity for providers in the healthcare industry. Product and strategic collaboration can help amplify each partner’s efforts. It’s not always a case of reinventing the wheel but working well, together. Crucially, digital healthcare is not only making it easier for providers to do this, but for clinicians too.
Telehealth itself is a great example of how digital technology is sharing information quickly and widely to support clinicians. Philips has been collaborating with the Radbound university medical centre, Holland, to look at how to better monitor COPD patients in the community. By working with Radbound and its patients, we’ve explored the possibility of real-time, 24/7 monitoring and improved information from which clinicians can make decisions on patient care programmes.
An outpatient with breathing difficulties caused by their COPD will be hesitant to regularly travel between home and hospital clinics for tests, but by providing a small monitor, worn around the neck, we’ve removed that burden. The data is transmitted constantly and any abnormal readings trigger a real-time alert to the supervising clinician. So digital health is helping clinicians provide better care and helping providers work in a far more integrated fashion with professionals and patients.
Digital health is also making devices much smaller and more flexible. This makes them more appealing, increasing the demand. Within healthcare this demand is driven not only by fitness fans who can wear pedometers around their wrist also the less mobile or those living with chronic diseases, who can wear their health monitors discretely around their wrist or neck. This provides an innovation opportunity as changing health needs drive a need to create new support systems.
These examples are just a few that highlight how collaboration has brought improved results, both to providers and, most importantly, to patients. If there’s a key takeaway to those, it would be to highlight that collaboration is not only desirable, it’s essential.