Ascom Asks the Experts: Exploring the Benefits of a Connected Healthcare Platform - Insights from the Industry

By David Gutillo, Director of Field Market Innovation, Healthcare, Ascom Americas

In a recent interview on Ascom’s Ask the Experts I sat down with Angus Douglas, a technology strategist and chief solutions architect with GE HealthCare. We talked about what connected care means in today’s healthcare environment, from the dCMU to virtual nursing to hospital at home.

A Journey Through Technological Evolution

Douglas has witnessed the transformation of healthcare technology firsthand in his 36 year career in healthcare software development focusing on connected care technologies like alarm management, clinical communication, real-time location systems and virtual care. What all these technologies have in common is aggregating information and mobilizing information for caregivers to be able to respond more quickly to their patients and drive better outcomes.

The Shift to Unified Communication

The conversation highlighted the shift towards a more integrated approach in healthcare communication now in its fifth generation. Angus emphasized the importance of a platform approach. “Each step of the way adds dependencies of systems. Just look at the pathway of a single alarm, starting with the source and then going to the rules engine that manages it, then going to some form of dispatch or visualization for the caregiver, and then their response back. There's a lot of steps, and we need to look at the overall pathway and experience end-to-end in order to have dependable systems. And in the post-COVID world with virtual care, we now have even more integrated and broader systems that require a truly unified ecosystem as well as broad team-based collaboration. To really deploy end-to-end effectively, you've got to not only design it in a different manner, you've got to integrate it and have system monitoring between all these steps to truly have end-to-end testing. That requires a lot more than just deploying a technology,” he said.

Challenges and Best Practices

I asked him about some of the common challenges that hospitals and health systems are facing and how to overcome them. He said number one is not focusing on adoption. “So we often try to look at the workflow, and we're looking at the outcomes first.” He said hospitals should focus first on adopting and using the technology and then can layer on workflows. Douglas noted an important distinction. “These are not technology projects. These are clinical transformation projects.” He stressed that they require reimagining workflows and focusing on adoption while warning against over-reliance on electronic health record (EHR) providers to do all things.

When it comes to areas of care that get the most value out of connected care, Douglas said it depends upon the specific model. He stated, “On clinical communications, the way you get value out of that system is to have everybody on the same platform so you don't have islands of communication.” He shared that also applies to command center technology and capacity management. “You're either all in or you're not getting the value out of it. But with things like virtual care and surveillance and central monitoring and also going into the home, you can do this incrementally.

And that's where we're seeing a lot of organizations start in certain areas.” Ascom helps enable the dCMU with middleware solutions that facilitate mobile data visualization and  unified clinical communication.

We also chatted about another example being virtual nursing where some hospitals are trying to start with a few units by testing it, refining it and then moving it into other areas. He ranked priority areas starting with telemetry and med-surg for early detection and patient safety because these caregivers are spread across many patients and broad geographies, making it hard to stay on top of each patient. He sees the second priority the ICU due to the incredible amount of data pouring into the critical care environment and finding a way to make effective clinical decisions in a timely manner.

The Future of Healthcare

Looking ahead, we talked about new care models, and Douglas predicted significant growth in home monitoring and home care, driven by the need for health system providers to address capacity and financial challenges. We touched on the potential of AI and predictive technologies to automate operational tasks and enhance clinical decision-making and looked at differentiating between having and using the technology. “We have plenty of technology to go around right now, but how do we use it?” he pondered.

Watch the full Ascom Asks the Experts interview on our website for more intelligence and insights.