Royal Philips, a global leader in health technology, and the Dutch Rijnstate Hospital have signed a new 10-year strategic partnership agreement to jointly develop the ‘hospital of the future’.
The new hospital concept will use the latest monitoring and connected health technologies to expand its delivery of care from the hospital to a regional care network, including the home.
At the heart of this new concept will be a ‘virtual care coordination centre’, an advanced central command hub, from where care providers will remotely monitor the health of patients both inside and outside the hospital.
This new agreement builds on a successful existing long-term strategic partnership between Philips and Rijnstate Hospital in the field of imaging solutions.
Advances in technology have enabled an ever-increasing number of medical procedures and treatments to be provided in outpatient or day-care settings.
At the same time, the growing number of people living with chronic conditions, such as heart failure or COPD, is pushing up both healthcare demand and healthcare costs.
These trends are encouraging health systems to transform their healthcare delivery and business models into more sustainable approaches where care is safely moved to lower-cost settings and that focus on improved patient outcomes, engagement and experience.
To this end, Rijnstate Hospital in partnership with Philips will develop and implement a new hospital concept, in which remote monitoring of an individual patient’s health is an essential component.
Philips’ advanced patient monitoring solutions will support care professionals and patients in the hospital’s general wards and intensive care units.
Philips’ IntelliVue Guardian Solution with Early Warning Scoring, wirelessly linked to a wearable biosensor, will continuously monitor patients and provide automatic measurement of key vital signs for at-risk patients in low acuity areas as they move from emergency departments to general wards.
The in-hospital monitoring solutions will be complemented with cloud-based population health management solutions for the delivery of personalised care outside of the hospital.
Philips’ VitalHealth care coordination solutions will integrate patient information across different care settings and data from different information systems to provide Rijnstate with insights into the total population for proactive interventions.
“Part of this new concept will be that, together with Philips, we will fully redesign our care processes,” said Wim van Harten, CEO of Rijnstate Hospital.
“In Philips, we have a strategic partner that is able to provide a complete solution, because only offering technology is not effective. It is of course essential that, once a care professional is alerted, he or she can quickly reach the patient’s home, or the patient can be taken quickly to the hospital, so that they are adequately cared for.”
All these solutions come together in a central ‘virtual care coordination centre’, where a team of care professionals will be able to monitor patients, spot early signs of patient deterioration and proactively engage with patients.
It should enable Rijnstate to achieve fewer and shorter hospitalisations requiring significantly less bed capacity. It will also allow to scale care from currently 650 in-hospital beds to potentially 450,000 beds in the homes of people throughout the region.
