The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that the healthcare systems in the Asia Pacific region — even in highly resourced nations — are not agile and resilient to acute threats. Pre-existing vulnerabilities, including the lack of communication between public health and healthcare delivery systems, led to a shortage of hospital beds, severely underworked medical professionals and many other issues in hospitals.
The good news is that various technologies are readily available to help healthcare institutions be more efficient and agile to quickly adapt to changes. “Healthcare digital transformation is entering the deep-water zone. New digital technologies — such as 5G, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud computing — [can be] combined with medical engineering to support the innovations in healthcare and speed up its development,” says Xia Zun, president of Huawei Global Public Sector, at a media roundtable on the side of Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023 in Barcelona.
He also shares some of the common challenges hospitals face. For instance, they tend to struggle to locate and manage various devices in wards, keep track of many patients and visitors, as well as manage many siloed networks as different services use different networks. This leads to inefficient operations and poor patient experience.
The digital makeover
To overcome those issues, the Huazhong University of Science and Technology Union Shenzhen Hospital in China decided to unify its networks by using the Huawei Campus OptiX solution to construct a network infrastructure that supports its overall operations.
By centralising the networks, the hospital reduced its workload and improved the efficiency of its network operations and maintenance by 60%. It can also adapt to changes easily as the Huawei Campus OptiX solution, which is based on a fibre network that supports ongoing bandwidth upgrades, can support medical systems requiring high bandwidth and low latency, such as robot-assisted surgery.
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The Union Shenzhen Hospital is also using the Huawei Cloud IoT platform to connect numerous devices to the cloud, as well as for data collection, command delivery, and bidirectional message communication between devices and the cloud. The platform also offers various device management services and allows device data to be flexibly transferred to other Huawei Cloud services, therefore enabling intelligent or data-driven healthcare operations and services.
Besides that, the hospital is working with Huawei on all-optical image viewing, smart data centre, multi-tiered connectivity and more, to become a smart hospital that is patient-centric. “By cooperating with Huawei, Union Shenzhen Hospital has built a solid cloud-network foundation and an information highway. [We are] committed to building a smart hospital system that features one-hour medical treatment, one-stop services, and one-time visit at most to provide citizens with high-quality medical services and medical experience,” says Deng Qiwen, president of the hospital.
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How the Union Shenzhen Hospital is transforming itself to become a truly smart, patient-centric hospital. Photo: Screenshot from Huawei's smart hospital online showcase website
Accelerating healthcare transformation
At MWC 2023, Huawei unveiled four scenario-based solutions to accelerate digital transformation in healthcare. Here are offerings that can help hospitals improve operational efficiency and enhance their quality of services:
- An all-optical medical imaging solution, which includes network, storage, intelligent interaction, and video conferencing. It can load thousands of images in seconds, protect the data throughout its lifecycle, and reconstruct the image in 3D with 4K high definition. It offers a fast, stable, intelligent experience, significantly improving diagnosis and treatment efficiency.
- A digital pathology solution based on Huawei OceanStor Pacific distributed storage and lossless compression algorithms for pathological data. Pathological diagnosis — in which cells and tissues are examined to identify diseases — is considered the gold standard in clinical practice. This solution allows full-lifecycle storage and high-quality management of pathological data while saving 30% storage space. It also speeds up analysis by enabling more than 1000 tissue slices to be viewed in seconds.
- A smart ward solution featuring a three-in-one all-wireless IoT network. Using 5G, IoT, and WiFi technologies, the solution help hospitals reduce network rollout and maintenance costs. It can also improve patient experience through healthcare IoT applications, including intravenous(IV) fluids monitoring, asset management, baby theft prevention, and personnel location.
- A smart hospital ICT infrastructure featuring an active-active data centre and converged campus network. This helps hospitals to build a stable, fast and secure infrastructure, and ensure that business systems can run 24x7 smoothly.
When asked how healthcare organisations can ensure a successful digital transformation, Koh Hong Eng, Huawei’s global chief scientist of public services industry, believes having a “grand vision [or end goal] of what they want to achieve” is crucial. This will provide direction for the areas of investment and experimentation.
However, he also highlights the need to fail fast. “After you invest [in a certain experiment], you must see some value after some time, such as six months. If it doesn’t bring value, you must be brave enough to terminate it [to avoid] wasting resources.”
Hospitals should have a steering committee for digital transformation too. Koh explains that since the chief information officers are usually firefighting to solve day-to-day problems, it will be good to have another leader, such as a chief digital transformation officer, to drive and focus on transformational projects that bring efficiency and new services to the hospital. Doing so will help hospitals deliver better care quality, even when they are faced with limited budgets.
