My future hospital experience, today.
How Belgian start-ups are advancing the hospital as we know it.
Many entrepreneurs are looking ahead by redefining how we should experience healthcare. And rethinking the interface between patients and hospital staff seems to be an interesting and exciting challenge for these innovators. Here’s a somewhat personal story to demonstrate a little of what’s possible.
Before undergoing surgery
Last year, I suffered a pretty complex sports injury, after which my ankle had to be reinforced with several titanium screws and plates. When I got surgery in November 2018, I already knew that a follow-up surgery the year after was inevitable. But knowing this almost a year in advance, I opened the Carey app on my phone — which was built to assist me before and after surgery — and already scheduled my follow-up surgery through the Umbi integration. This enabled me to easily choose a moment at my own convenience. Together with an instant confirmation, I was given a quick overview of what the surgery would entail. All thanks to LynxCare’s AI-powered data platform that collected and analysed the data from all previous surgical interventions that were similar to the one I would go through. This gave me the opportunity to get a rough idea on how long I would have to stay home, if at all, and the additional information allowed me to know what (not) to plan in the days after the surgery.
Fast forward to the week before my follow-up surgery, Umbi made sure to send me a reminder through my preferred communication channel on my phone. I remember opening the Carey app again to find the relevant resources related to my specific situation, which were carefully curated and updated by Meplis. Information about my health insurance, my surgeon, what to expect before, during and after the surgery, how to prepare and what the time schedule looked like, were all available and displayed in easily digestible chunks of information. Carey’s AI-powered chatbot asked me whether I had any other questions, and reasssured me that additional infomation was only one click away.
As I had access to real-time waiting times and scheduling updates through the Caldr integration with the hospital’s IT system, I was notified when my Booqit driver would arrive to pick me up at home, taking into account real-time traffic information. As I was dropped off about an hour before my planned surgery, I was automatically ‘checked in’ because of the hospital’s smart mobility system that registered the license plate of my Booqit driver’s car upon my arrival. All I had left to do was to pick up my personal wristband, which was instantly printed at one of the little kiosks in the hospital’s entrance hall after scanning the QR code I received on my Carey app. The wristband —which was built by ByteFlies and equipped with the FibriCheck software to continuously monitor my vitals— was powered by the Sensinxs Smart Health Platform to track my location within the hospital building. I remember using the wayfinding interface within the Carey app to show me the route to my assigned waiting room, and the real-time waiting times in the app confirmed that everything seemed to be on schedule.
When I arrived in the waiting room, I was automatically sent the link to Bingli, which uses an AI-powered chatbot to gauge my feelings and assess my current situation through an intuitive anamnesis. The information was instantly stored away in my electronic patient file, and was used to inform my surgeon of any relevant insights. When I was done with the Bingli questionnaire, I used the Carey app to access some additional explanatory video content on my surgery, curated by Meplis and made by CAST. I remember seeing a few other patients using the Oncomfort VR equipment in one of the waiting room’s cozy corners to relieve their anxiety and stress. And since everything was on schedule, I knew I only had to wait a mere 10 minutes.
During and after the procedure
While I was being prepared for surgery — with the help of the DEO preoperative efficiency solution — , the surgeon was notified that I was almost ready. He grabbed his Hololens when entering the operating room, which he used to project any relevant information during the course of the procedure. The Hololens displayed the incision lines on my body with incredible accuracy. As I didn’t have any additional questions for my surgeon, we had a short and relaxing chat before starting the procedure. After all, I was able to access all the information I needed through the Carey app before the surgery. I was then given a set of Oncomfort VR glasses to get into a state of clinical hypnosis. The use of VR during surgery, as apposed to complete anasthesia, has proven to shorten the recovery time and avoid any of the unwanted side effects.
The surgeon removed the plates and screws he used to realign my ankle joint a year before. They were designed and 3D-printed by CADskills based on my personal anatomy and conveniently delivered with some other medical equipment by drone through Helicus. And during the procedure, Pixelvision’s PieHealth deep learning computer vision solution was constantly detecting and tracking every surgical instrument in the room to avoid anything going lost.
When my surgeon was finished, I was brought to a cozy room with a voice-enabled smart speaker — powered by Maverbeam — next to my bed, which I could interact with if I needed anything. The Carey app enabled me to log any pain, swelling or other unpleasand side effects after the surgery on my personal dashboard. And when my surgeon came into the room to debrief me on how well the procedure went, he reminded me about all of the relevant information regarding my surgery I could find on my Carey app. Thanks to the Ontoforce data platform integration with the hospital’s IT system, my surgeon was given valuable insights into the right medication and healthcare apps to prescribe, for which the Carey app offered a convenient way to manage my medication schedule. The moveUP wearable sensor — which was provided to me by the nurse upon my hospital discharge — allowed me to begin my personal rehabilitation schedule, all while my surgeon is updated through regular reports. And post-operative wound care was easily facilitated and scheduled through the Kwiekzilver platform. Oh, and if not for my brother’s day off work, the hospital would’ve booked another Booqit ride home for me.
So what’s the point?
You’re right, most of what’s described above isn’t a reality, yet. When I went into surgery 2 weeks ago, my experience wasn’t as easy and frictionless. But the story isn’t all that far-fetched, because the 20 start-ups that I’ve mentioned from our network are actively contributing towards such a frictionless hospital experience by building great and cost-effective solutions, both for patients and hospital staff. Many still have a great deal of work ahead of them, some are already there. But besides this handful of examples, many more are disrupting the way patients are treated today.
There are 2 big trends in this story. First of all, the healthcare interface is moving into our pockets, right where it belongs. Today’s society runs on our smartphone, allowing for a type of accessibility and convenience never seen before. Healthcare won’t be any different. Secondly, hospitals are more and more becoming data and information companies. Pretty much all of the solutions in the scenario above are counting on — or will at least count on — AI algorithms to enrich their information and extract the most relevant insights, so users can act accordingly. Today’s IT departments have become the most important of all hospital divisions. Just like an air traffic control tower operates the complexity of flights coming in and out of the airport, the hospital’s IT department will operate the complexity of all that’s happening in the hospital.
But dealing with the magnitude of new software solutions to implement brings with it its own set of challenges. Hospitals and other care organizations are flooded with new solutions every week, and it takes time — and money — to integrate them. Let alone to onboard the people who would have to use them. That’s why the solutions that are built in isolation, without the crucial feedback from the patients, care providers or other end users, simply stand no chance.
This scenario only takes into account the hospital experience, but since healthcare is incredibly multidisciplinary — with many shared responsibilities across different organisations and stakeholders — sharing the right data and insights is paramount. Even more so when we’re starting to realize that more and more care will take place outside of the hospital. In fact, most of the information is actually already available. It’s simply not yet distilled into the relevant insights. And it’s even less communicated well, if at all. The focus of many regulators and innovators clearly lies on the interoperability between IT systems inside and outside of care organisations, with rigorous data strategies that cover both internal and external data sharing standards. It’s also one of the most complex challenges our industry faces at the moment, but one that has the ability to completely alter the way we experience healthcare. All of these efforts have the same end goal: to enable true personalization in order to reach the end user with the right insights at the right time, through the channels that really matter. And that’s the paradigm shift healthcare needs.
So throughout the entire story, there is a clear common denominator: these innovations allow for more time for actual care. All these frictionless touchpoints, easy access to hyper-personalized information, and seamless ways of communicating will create the ability for hospital staff and care providers to really empathize again, without the need for mindless piles of administrative work. It’s time to let technology do what it’s good at, so humans can do what they’re good at.
And on a final note, my surgeon was actually the first in Belgium to use the Microsoft Hololens with it’s AR capabilities during a routine surgery. Come and listen to his story at our 2019 closing event, where we’ll dive into the world of Extended Reality in Healthcare. And if you’re interested in the hospital of the future, I encourage you to participate in our Hack4Health hackathon in March, where we’ll come up with solutions and ways to build a new and future-proof Ghent University Hospital campus.
Read my previous blog posts here, or let’s connect if you’re interested in a chat.
As a disclaimer, the views or opinions expressed in my blog articles are personal and do not reflect upon those of the people or organisations I’m associated with.
