Amruta Inc, Mary Washington Healthcare, Verizon, and OST Inc present at HSPI 2022

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, health systems were facing transformational changes such as value-based payments, star ratings and other evaluations, and regulatory demands. The advent of COVID-19 has increased the need for connectivity, mobility, agility, innovative care coordination, data-driven interventions, and software-defined

infrastructure and asset management. Overcoming the hurdles due to the COVID-19 crisis has put an undue strain on health system operations. Now hospitals want to do more with less improvement upon their initial responses such as telehealth for patients in isolation, real-time data and analytics, mobile devices, room and site reconfigurations, and care team coordination.

We are building upon our initial pilots and the success of our smart health and connected hospital pilots, including data-driven monitoring, diagnosis, and intervention as well as telehealth-based patient visit scheduling, virtual visits, and automated translator workflows. Our next steps include expanding the smart health initiative to collect more data from operations and clinical processes as well as external data to reduce infection rates and costs using AI and machine learning (ML). We are also expanding the telehealth to in-room family videos, virtual clinical team roundtables, remote patient monitoring, and connected ambulance/EMS. Besides 5G methods, we are also deploying the IoT/edge AI.

The initial results from our smart health and connected hospital programs, across health systems, have been encouraging. Emergency department congestion is reduced by 14% in a health system due to our smart health AI. Similarly, our AI models predict that inpatient length of stay and costs can be reduced significantly. Multiple health systems have deployed our telehealth application, and 80% of clinicians view the ease of telehealth usage as a driver of better patient outcomes. However, 58% of healthcare leaders report that current telehealth technology is too difficult for patients to use. The need for mobility is also skyrocketing as hospitals reconfigure care.

While the preliminary results indicate that smart health and connected hospitals in the form of ML/AI and telehealth implementation methods can help health systems meet their challenges, much work remains to be done. 5G/broadband coverage continues to be a challenge. Data collection needed for implementing the ML/AI models and connected hospitals involves integrating EHR and operational data with the telehealth data, edge, and ML/AI processing. We are making the implementation of this strategic transformation in incremental but effective steps.

You can access the presentation slides at (PDF) Smart and Connected Hospital - A Strategic Care Transformation and Implementation Methods (researchgate.net)