PHILIPS

Agentic AI is not just a smarter model — it's a different operating system for healthcare. Unlike predictive AI, which samples small slices of structured data, agentic systems are data-hungry.

Healthcare providers face significant challenges in pathology. By enabling more efficient, collaborative workflows, digital pathology solutions can help them transition from legacy analogue processes and address the shortage of trained pathologists.

Healthcare delivery is entering an age of redefinition. As industry leaders gathered in Dubai for the HIMSS Executive Summit, one key discussion examined how new technologies enable clinical transformation and device integration in acute care practice.

As we enter 2024, healthcare organizations are already focusing on all the above plus advancing digital health and telemedicine, clinical efficiency, employee retention and outsourcing their IT utilizing managed services.

Collaborative approach to digital transformation.

Healthcare providers are using this strategy to enable better access and improved data management and administration. 

How an innovative balance of the clinical with the commercial can be the route to delivering quality care.

Philips is working to help manage patients’ healthcare journeys in a way that achieves the quadruple aim: delivering the best care, while improving workstreams and creating efficiencies for care teams and health systems.  

Philips unveiled an integrated suite of offerings which promises to revolutionize workflow in the radiology department by addressing the most pressing operational challenges across diagnostic and interventional radiology, at the RSNA 2020 virtual event.  These include its AI-enabled automated Radiology Workflow Suite, the industry-first vendor neutral Radiology Operations Command Center and the Phillips Advanced Visualization Workspace- IntelliSpace Portal 12.  By shifting from standalone products to an integrated systems and solutions approach, the Philips Radiology Workflow Suite helps to optimize radiology workflows and generate insights from integrated diagnostics. Patient data can also be connected across departments, creating interoperability for greater clinical intelligence and analysis.  This leads to clearer care pathways and predictable outcomes for every patient.   As part of its integrated suite of offerings, Philips will be launching the industry’s first vendor-neutral, multimodality, radiology operations command centre to add secure, digital virtual scanner access to existing imaging installs across multiple systems and sites. Its Radiology Operations Command Center is able to connect technologists with onsite staff in a distant location to provide real-time support and collaboration. As such, the Command Center enables remote access to scanners across an imaging network and is compatible with older imaging platforms.   The Philips Advanced Visualization Workspace- IntelliSpace Portal 12 boasts a set of new AI-assisted quantitative and automatic results generation features to support the diagnostic workflow. Its AI-assisted pulmonary capabilities include the assessment of complex lung conditions associated with COVID-19. This greatly streamlines workflow by automatically generating quantitative measurements and making radiology data available.    Innovation in the areas of radiography can bring about a plethora of benefits to both patients and healthcare specialists in several areas.   Firstly, through digitization, the frequency of patient no-shows can be greatly reduced. Such situations often cause a disruption to the workflow, leaving staff and equipment underutilized which in turn can lead to huge financial losses. Boston Medical Centre (BMC) has reaped huge benefits from digitally engaging patients before and after their appointment. Personalized text messages are delivered to remind patients of their upcoming exams and links to safety protocols or other helpful information are shared with them.   When patients arrive for their appointment, they can check in via text and do not need to gather in a waiting room which reduces the likelihood of physical interaction. Once the patient is ready to be examined, a text message is sent to invite them in. This has saved frontline staff over a thousand phone calls to patients.  By automating workflow, radiology technologists are able to get more accurate scan results the first time. For example in MR, the workload of the technologist can be reduced by automating exam planning, scanning and processing. Additionally, exam variability is also decreased and technologists are more confident in their diagnosis.   With the presence of a virtual central command center, image acquisition can be shared amongst both experienced technologists and their less experienced colleagues. As such, professional assistance can be rendered at multiple locations in real-time without the hassle of travelling.   The use of intelligent algorithms helps to automatically prioritize the cases according to their urgency and determine the best match of cases to the radiologist based on their area of expertise, availability as well as current workload. For example, when a patient with a sudden acute headache is rushed into the ED and a CT scan reveals haemorrhaging within the brain, the work task will automatically appear on the top of the work list of the neuroradiologist who is available at that moment.  Interactive multimedia offers deeper insights to clinicians by providing in-depth, longitudinal insights in radiology reports without the need for them to search for prior reports and manually compare images. Interactive multimedia reporting grants the ability to embed key images for side-by-side comparison, tumor trending information in charts and graphs and qualitative data for advanced post-processing.  By creating a unified dashboard that automatically integrates patient information from multiple sources, it facilitates clinical collaboration and aids the care team in their decision making process.   Lastly, real-time data analytics has paved the way for opportunities to better manage operations. For instance, by providing radiologists with the tools to continuously monitor KPIs such as modality-specific exam volumes, resource utilization and cancellation rates, they can better comprehend how patient engagement changes in tandem with the demand for services.   To learn more about Philips' Radiology Workflow Suite, click here.

The healthcare industry has a golden opportunity to consolidate the advances achieved in digital health and virtual care during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now is the moment to capitalise on a remarkable shift in the energy and expectations of younger healthcare professionals, among whom the rapid accumulation of experience throughout the COVID-19 response has significantly changed attitudes to digital health technologies. This shift is captured in the Future Health Index (FHI) Insights: COVID-19 and Younger Healthcare Professionals survey, which supplements the main Future Health Index 2020 global report, The Age of Opportunity. The Future Health Index insights report captures feedback from 500 doctors under the age of 40 in five countries: the United States of America, China, Singapore, France and Germany. Before the pandemic, 60% of younger healthcare professionals surveyed for the main report considered AI the digital health technology most likely to improve their work satisfaction, compared with 39% who felt that telehealth would have the most impact. The latest research reveals that COVID-19 has reversed those predictions, with 61% now favouring telehealth over AI (53%). The benefits of digital health technologies, including telehealth, realised during the crisis are reflected in the 47% of younger doctors who reported greater appreciation from their patients, and in the 44% who experienced enhanced collaboration with their colleagues across different skillsets. Staying power Among the most significant research findings for the future of healthcare in terms of retention and commitment is that 38% are more likely to stay in medicine as a result of their pandemic experience, while just 9% are more likely to abandon medicine. Pre COVID, 25% of younger healthcare professionals had considered leaving the healthcare profession as a result of work-related stress. In other words, a prolonged global healthcare crisis that might have been expected to leave a trail of professional burnout and disenchantment in its wake has actually galvanised the commitment of much of the workforce. This, according to Jan Kimpen, chief medical officer at Philips, which published the survey in September, is highly significant if the industry is to successfully exploit their enthusiasm around digital health, and their hopes for continued investment in technologies that will carry the benefits for their work satisfaction into the future. “The balance between people being more energised to stay on in the profession, and inspired by the work they are doing, and the respect and recognition from their peers, society and their patients has had a positive effect on them – and that’s a hopeful result,” he says. “I have so much respect for these people who literally put themselves in harm’s way during COVID. And this is what we need: human beings in healthcare.” The human benefits derived across virtual care during the pandemic, including improved patient relationships and greater collaboration between frontline medics and their specialist colleagues in other departments, could only have been achieved with digital technologies that enable information and patient data sharing. “The pandemic revealed how the connection between doctors and their patients could be preserved because of the digital health opportunities that we had,” says Kimpen. “We saw very fast that telehealth and virtual care was making it possible for patients to take care of themselves remotely with the help of doctors, without having to go to hospital and face the fear of being infected by the virus there.” Before COVID, virtual care had been a ‘nice-to-have’, he explains. During COVID it rapidly became a ‘need-to-have’. The ability to maintain a patient/doctor relationship remotely was a major step-up for virtual care. Kimpen suggests that two aspects of telehealth in particular have signalled a strong future direction: remote monitoring, which accelerated greatly during the pandemic, enabling patients with chronic diseases to be cared for at home; and data sharing across platforms such as the COVID-19 portal in the Netherlands, which allow patient data to be shared in real time, in a secure, safe and confident way among colleagues in different departments and hospitals. According to research carried out by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), 32% of people in the US with at least one chronic health condition had used telehealth in April, May or June. More specifically, 44% of diabetes patients, 37% of asthma patients and 33% of those with hypertension had accessed telehealth services. Industry hurdles Taking this trend into a dynamic post-COVID era will depend on overcoming four hurdles. And it is in the power of four key segments in the healthcare industry – technology providers, healthcare professionals of all ages, hospitals and governments – to build on the advances already achieved. For technology providers such as Philips, the digital solutions that make this degree of data sharing possible, the focus must be on making them easy to use, interoperable, trustworthy, safe and secure. Healthcare professionals must also play their part by embracing the new ways of working that these tools support. Hospitals must be ready to invest in IT infrastructure while knowing that ROI will only come in time and is dependent on adoption by their professional users. And governments must resolve privacy and safety issues to allow data sharing – among hospitals, and ultimately across state or country borders - with decent but not restrictive legislation. Kimpen warns that healthcare systems which are slow to seize the virtual care momentum risk being left behind as the industry continues to pivot to value-based healthcare: digitalisation is a key enabler of cost reduction and the provision of better patient experiences through this transformation. In this new world, some of the transformations seen in the reimbursement arena, for example, are likely to continue as new ways of accounting in areas such as remote patient consultations or digital pathology assessments become mainstream. The way in which telehealth appears to have leapfrogged over AI as the technology that would have most improved work satisfaction during COVID is probably more to do with the way in which younger doctors seized the tools to hand than a reversal of a pre-COVID trend. Kimpen says that AI has certainly not been pushed back on their agenda – it is simply that telehealth helped them in real time. They continue to have high expectations for both technologies. Great expectations Those expectations will play an important role in the ongoing evolution of digital health beyond the pandemic. National health systems will all face their own challenges as they navigate the complex journey to value-based care. But as the results of the Future Health Index Insights report reveal, the wealth of experience obtained by younger healthcare professionals across the industry in such a short and intense period is probably one of their most important resources. It might even hold the key to future success. Research methodology The Future Health Index Insights: COVID-19 and Younger Healthcare Professionals survey was fielded from June 19 to July 30, 2020 in 5 countries (China, France, Germany, Singapore and the United States of America) in their native language. The survey was conducted online and offline (as relevant to the needs of each country) with a sample size of 100 per country for doctors under 40 years old, who have completed their first medical degree. The survey length was approximately 10 minutes. The total sample from the survey includes 500 doctors under 40 years old.