Good healthcare technology advances diagnosis and treatments. The best solutions deliver holistic efficiency, faster insight and accuracy that maximises both benefits and finite funds.
Healthcare is a study in contrasts. On the one hand, it is rich with innovation, brilliant clinicians, world-class research, cutting-edge technology, and sophisticated health systems that provide care for some of the most challenging conditions and procedures.
On the other hand, complexity in the financing, regulation and delivery of care counteracts these considerable strengths to some degree. At every turn, there seem to be barriers to providing patients with personalised, efficient care, creating burdens for both patients and care providers – and adding costs without adding value.
Today, more than ever, a first order concern for governments across Australia – federal and state – remains the delicate balancing act of structuring the competing priorities of providing optimum and vital health services with finite fiscal resources.
Add an ageing population that is living longer and a constrained revenue base to the policy mix and its clear better strategies are urgently needed to make Australia’s health dollar work harder and more equitably.
Towards collaborative healthcare
In the face of these challenges, it’s encouraging to look at the great progress being made to break down these barriers. Like a hospital system that is providing daily care to patients with chronic conditions in the comfort of their own homes, while reducing costs and utilisation.
Or a leading healthcare system using predictive care management tools for ICU[SA1] patients to reduce hospital stays and readmissions, while addressing the critical care shortage and saving millions in costs.
And a cardiovascular centre treating high-risk cases with less invasive, image-guided technologies that can reduce the length of stay and improve patients’ overall quality of life.
Or a research hospital on a mission to create an entirely digital database of tissue samples that will allow pathologists to gain greater insight, facilitating individualised care and optimised treatments.
As a global leader in healthcare technology and solutions, Philips knows these stories because we’ve been there, working collaboratively with these health systems to break down the boundaries, remove complexity and deliver on a more seamless approach to healthcare when, where and how people need it the most.
Innovation. Transformation. Collaboration. That’s what inspires these health systems to partner with us. Industry-leading technologies coupled with an approach that forges new paths in care delivery. A relentless pursuit to make life better.
A vision of more seamless care that breaks down boundaries and reduces complexity. This is what drives us.
Removing barriers with enduring partnerships
While Philips has a deep understanding of the challenges that affect the overall performance of Australia’s healthcare system, we see numerous opportunities to make it better. This, however, is not a road travelled alone. It requires deep and trusted partnerships grounded in collaboration, sharing both rewards and risks.
Our customers have made it clear that, as the complexity of healthcare gets more intense, working with the overwhelming web of disparate vendors and solutions is no longer a viable option. We couldn’t agree more.
Partnership is far more than a word or a signature on a purchase order. To us, true partnership means rolling up our sleeves and working side-by-side with our customers to identify and implement meaningful solutions customized to each organization’s individual needs and challenges.
Innovation with purpose
It requires moving from a transactional to a transformational relationship where we together tackle the toughest challenges specific to each customer.
While each of our alliances is as individual as the needs of our customers, they all focus on implementing meaningful innovations, centred on patients and care providers, designed to break down barriers and complexity and to offer better value to patients, providers and the overall healthcare system.
We start with a careful assessment of our customer’s existing capabilities and needs, then create a strategic roadmap that will prepare them for the future. We believe our approach to partnership truly sets us apart within our industry.
We understand that achieving more seamless care is hindered by the friction and barriers that interoperability can pose in care delivery. As such, we take a vendor-agnostic approach with our open-source platforms and our willingness to work with technology from other vendors.
While our commitment to product innovation and R&D investment is greater than ever, we’re also partnering to drive process innovation. Our Healthcare Transformation Services consulting team works closely with customers to achieve meaningful and sustainable operational and clinical improvements as well as to design patient-focused environments, which has led to numerous enhancements, from emergency departments to cath labs to entirely new patient care centres.
A critical underpinning of our partnerships is our commitment to responsive service. In many cases, we embed clinical, service and technical resources into our client’s organisation for success. We jointly develop Key Performance Indicators to measure our progress on meeting their most critical challenges. That approach has helped our imaging, cardiovascular and monitoring systems rank #1 in numerous service performance measures in recent years.
The transformation has begun
We are driven to cut through complexity to improve productivity and organise care seamlessly around people – both patients and care providers. While there are many challenges to address, we prioritise four areas of opportunity: simplifying data and insight gathering, driving improved treatment and outcomes, removing excess costs from the system wherever possible, and giving patients and staff a better experience.
It’s a tall order, for sure, but one we are both capable and committed to addressing. Our integrated portfolio of products and solutions, coupled with our hands-on consultative approach and award-winning service, are helping our clients make strides in all of these areas today.
For example, in high-demand areas for nursing care, we’ve developed automated tools that provide a comprehensive view of the patient’s condition while simplifying medical documentation and better utilising staff resources. The IntelliVue Guardian with Early Warning System (EWS) solution encompasses innovative technology along with our supplementary clinical services that can help guide adoption with change management planning, execution, staff education, and post-implementation support.
To help providers work toward providing the right care at the right time in the right place, we’ve created a host of new solutions that reduce redundancies and allow them to diagnose faster and less invasively. Technology such as the IQon Spectral CT can help clinicians characterise a liver lesion through improved visualisation, and the anatomically intelligent 3D modeling technology of HeartModel makes cardiac ultrasound exams easier to perform and reduces variability by delivering critical information in seconds.
Above all, we remain laser-focused on creating solutions that put patients first. Today’s health consumers are more empowered and demanding than ever before – and rightfully so. They’re paying a far greater percentage of their healthcare costs out of their own pockets. They deserve a more comfortable and satisfying experience, like that of our Ambient Experience In-Bore MRI Suite. With the Ambient Experience In-Bore Connect solution, patients were significantly more satisfied with their MRI examinations.
Doing more together
The vision of seamless care will become even more critical as the healthcare industry shifts more of its focus away from sick care to prevention and healthy living. Philips is using its unique position as a long-established innovator focused on serving customer needs with many ‘first of its kind’ solutions, to bring together people, technology and departments into a more seamless workflow across the care continuum.
Our aim with seamless care is to break down boundaries, deliver meaningful innovation, and realise our vision of improving the lives of three billion people a year by 2025. We’re excited about contributing to a better future with ground breaking innovations such as our first digital pathology solution, which will accelerate clinicians’ ability to detect and treat diseases like cancer.
We’re also developing and applying artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies with the goal to enable earlier treatments customised for each patient – care that is predictive, integrated and precise.
To move toward seamless care, together we must continue to break down the barriers between departments and specialists, create breakthrough innovations, eliminate the obstacles separating patients and caregivers, and cross the boundaries that exist between healthcare settings and people’s homes.
Because today, health knows no bounds.
