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Picture diagnostic booths with large screen 8K resolution, telemedicine tools, sensors tracking just about everything, and more.

Pivot Labs, a collaboration with tech services company Persistent Systems, will also seek innovative ways to boost clinical outcomes and manage costs.

The issues shared during an Oct. 18 state senate meeting mirror those the healthcare sector faces: a lack of resources and an onslaught of attacks make it nearly impossible to keep up.

Former UK science minister Lord Drayson’s Sensyne Health has announced the commercial launch of the GDm-Health solution, developed to enable remote management of gestational diabetes in collaboration with Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Oxford. GDM (gestational diabetes mellitus), a pregnancy-related disease, can lead to adverse maternal and foetal outcomes without close blood glucose control. Sensyne Health’s cloud-based product includes an app that connects to a wireless blood glucose monitor, transmitting data, including measurements or any other notes logged by patients, to a web-based clinical dashboard that care teams can access. It allows patients to speak to the professionals involved in their care directly, and the development of the app follows a two-year long clinical evaluation in the NHS for more than 1,000 women, according to the company. Global Digital Exemplar OUH and its fast follower, Royal Berkshire NHS Foundation Trust, have already made the solution available to patients and their midwives. Batoul Mustafa, who used the app during her pregnancy, said GDm-Health enabled her to have “more personalised antenatal care”.  "The overwhelming positive response to GDm-Health from the NHS and from women with gestational diabetes is testament to its clinically led design and the fact it is technology that is addressing an area of urgent, clinical need. We look forward to its wider adoption in the coming months,” Lord Drayson said. The three other NHS sites that will start implementing GDm-Health are Buckinghamshire Healthcare, Croydon Health Services and Milton Keynes University Hospital. “GDm-Health will allow us to provide more responsive and personalised care to our women with gestational diabetes and we are excited to be one of the first Trusts to implement GDm-Health,” said Erum Khan, Consultant Obsetrician and Gynaecologist at Milton Keynes. Sensyne Health is backed by Sir John Bell, Regius professor of medicine at the University of Oxford and author of the UK’s Life Sciences Industrial Strategy, and former NHS England national medical director Sir Bruce Keogh.

Genomics England has awarded a multi-year contract to Cambridge-headquartered Congenica to provide diagnostic decision support services that will underpin the delivery of the NHS’s world-first initiative to create a national Genomic Medicine Service (GMS). Created through a partnership between the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the NHS, Congenica has established a footprint in the UK, US, and even China since launching, working on their 100k Wellness Pioneer Project. Its clinical genomics interpretation software Sapientia has been validated within the 100,000 Genomes Project, with scientists using it for clinical analysis and genomic interrogation to obtain actionable clinical reports, and the company's new contract to deliver the NHS GMS follows a “competitive tender process”, according to Genomics England. Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock announced earlier this year the ambition to sequence five million genomes in the UK during the next five years, with all seriously ill children and adults with certain rare diseases or hard-to-treat cancers to be offered whole genome sequencing as part of their care starting from next year. “The UK has always been at the forefront of genomic medicine and the launch of the new NHS service further demonstrates this. “The experience that Congenica has gained in working alongside the NHS and Genomics England to achieve this, [sic] puts us in a strong position to expand globally and integrate genomics effectively into other international healthcare systems,” said Dr Andy Richards, Congenica’s Chairman. Towards the end of August, the firm announced that Wendy Britten was appointed as its new Chief Financial Officer, joining them from pharma giant AstraZeneca. “By working with Congenica from the start of the 100,000 Genomes Project, we’ve been able to provide high quality variant interpretation of genome sequences to the NHS, helping deliver benefits to patients at scale. “Now that we are embarking on the next exciting step in our journey to embed genomic medicine in healthcare, Congenica will continue to play an important role with Genomics England in delivering results to clinicians and diagnoses to patients,” said Professor John Mattick, Genomics England Chief Executive.

Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust will open an AI-powered command centre at the Bradford Royal Infirmary next spring, thought to be the first of its kind in Europe, through a partnership with GE Healthcare. The trust provides acute and community health inpatient services for approximately 500,000 people from Bradford and the surrounding area in England at the Bradford Royal Infirmary, where its Emergency Centre is based, and St Luke’s, along with three other community hospitals. The new air traffic control-style or NASA-inspired centre is set to provide real-time access to an overview of the 800-bed hospital to help inform decisions on how to manage patient care, with up to 20 staff monitoring a so-called “Wall of Analytics”, pulling data from existing systems. NHS under strain: system facing unprecedented demand With more than 96 per cent of bed capacity at the Bradford infirmary regularly used and 125,000 A&E attendances per year, the new centre is expected to reduce length of stay and the need for additional wards and beds, particularly during winter times. “Demand for services is growing at Bradford Teaching Hospitals every year. The command centre will enable us to optimise our use of resources and improve how we move patients around the hospital for treatment and successful discharge,” said Professor Clive Kay, Chief Executive at the trust. A report published last year by the European Commission found that - excluding beds in the private sector - the UK, Spain, Denmark, and Sweden recorded in 2015 the lowest number of hospital beds relative to the size of their population, with under 300 per 100,000 people, looking at EU member states. Analysis from independent think-tank The King’s Fund indicates that the number of NHS hospital beds in England has more than halved during the past 30 years, while the number of patients being treated has significantly increased. Speaking at an event organised by communications firm Freuds in London back in September, calling for better use of IT in the NHS, NHS England Deputy Chief Executive Matthew Swindells said: “We have a choice, either we reinvent healthcare or we build three hospitals a year. I don’t think building three hospitals a year is what 21st century healthcare looks like.” GE-developed command centres opened in US and Canada GE Healthcare has partnered with a number of healthcare providers to launch several command centres in the US and Canada. At the Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Medicine, two years since the opening of the Judy Reitz Command Centre, the technology has been linked to a more than 40 per cent improvement in facilitating transfers for patients with complex medical conditions from other hospitals in the region, according to the supplier. These initiatives are different than existing transfer, bed management, and resource centres, the company says, because they are “multi-purpose and scalable”, managing “patient safety and experience”, including “predictive and prescriptive decision support tools, not just dashboards from IT systems”. “Command centres help to orchestrate the delivery of care across the organisation, bringing consistency to processes, prioritising actions, eliminating waste and predicting tomorrow’s pressure points,” said Mark Ebbens, European Command Centre Lead at GE Healthcare. Healthcare IT News reported earlier this year that GE spun off its healthcare business as a separate company towards the end of June, after recording more than $19bn in revenue in 2017. The total value of the procurement at Bradford Teaching Hospitals is estimated to cost around £5.5m, excluding VAT, according to a contract award notice published at the beginning of October.

Further, 38 percent of online appointments are booked after hours, which helps with both patient retention and new patient acquisition.