COVID-19 sparks boom in digital hospitals with smart technologies, improving quality of care

COVID-19 Sparks Boom in Digital Hospitals with Smart Technologies, Improving Quality of Care

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Frost & Sullivan’s recent analysis, Digital Hospitals: Creating Growth Opportunities in Patient Care during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond, finds that digital hospitals that deploy smart technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), remote health monitoring, and robotics, deliver higher standards of patient care and hassle-free experiences for health professionals.

The adoption of such advanced technologies has witnessed strong traction during the COVID-19 pandemic. There is a massive influx of patients, and traditional hospitals are struggling to provide quality care and ensure health professionals’ safety. Technology adoption is expected to rise further in the next two to three years due to higher-quality care and significant productivity gains.

“Digital hospitals address limitations of traditional providers such as centralized care delivery, closed systems, fee-for-service care models and a reactive approach through decentralized care, interoperable systems, and outcome-driven and proactive approaches,” said Neeraj Nitin Jadhav, technical insights senior research analyst at Frost & Sullivan, in a prepared statement. “To improve patients’ satisfaction levels at every step of care delivery during their stay in the facility, digital hospitals are using technologies like hospital navigation, intelligent imaging platforms, medical robots, remote patient monitoring tools, medication management applications, communication tools, electronic health record (EHR) applications, and clinical decision support solutions.”

Jadhav added: “Digital hospital operators need to focus on building internal architecture, especially staff workstations and patient rooms that follow evidence-based design (EBD), as these are the areas where clinical decisions are made and care is provided, respectively. Additionally, decentralized healthcare staff workstations outside the patient rooms can allow the staff to be closer to the point of care rather than a centralized area, which increases the travel distance for the health professionals.”

The increasing adoption of digital technologies in hospitals presents immense growth prospects for market participants in the digital hospital space, including:

• Deploying smart patient tracking systems to manage patient flow, treatment progress, discharge, and other hospital processes.
• Proper training and implementation of EHRs can improve a hospital’s ability to provide high-quality care and address health disparities in the population.
• Use of AI to make supply chain management more sophisticated as the algorithms process huge volumes of hospital data to identify trends and provide insights to improve the facilities’ efficiency and quality of care.
• Analyze data obtained from different hospital departments to empower local healthcare teams.