a-Commerce approaches the Hospital Industry after hitting the Hospitality Industry

About three months ago from today (today being 26 October 2015), I published the article a-Commerce hits the Hospitality Industry on 21 July 2015. This was as a follow-up to an article written a year prior,  The Advent of Automated Commerce: Real Implications on the Horizon on the blog Singapore Futurist, after the opening of the world's first robot staffed hotel in July this year. Now, I am following up on that article, because the month of October has just seen the opening of the world's first fully digital hospital with robot staff.

Humber River Hospital, an established medical facility provider, just moved out of an old building into a new facility with robots that man the radiology department, sort medications and deliver supplies to patient beds. They deliver the food too. And they "talk" to the lifts in the building with the use of data exchange over WiFi.

This news does not come as a surprise in the year the world saw the opening of a hotel staffed by robots. After all, there are significant similarities in operational and logistical requirements of running both hospitals and hotels.

Much of the technological features automating the processes and earning the hospital the rightful tag of "fully digital hospital" are not entirely new or unique. The various robots and automation features have already separately been introduced in many hospitals across the world, including at hospitals in Singapore (such as for moving trolleys and supplies). What distinguishes the Humber River Hospital, is the degree and extent to which those same technological features have been employed.

Unlike the world's first robot run hotel, the world's first robot run hospital has not brought about the replacement of human staff with robot staff. For now, it is more about robots assisting humans. However, given what the current automation technology employed at Humber River Hospital is already able to do, the replacement, is only a matter of time. 

A key difference between the automation of a hospital and a hotel, is the level of staff substitution. Eventually, within the next decade or decade and a half, we'll likely see mainstreaming across the first world of robotised surgery. However, this can only change the way in which human doctors will work, not effectively substitute or replace. It boils down to the nature of intellectual and non-repetitive work, which limits the advent of automation or artificial intelligence in the direction. While we may, or rather likely, see the generic outpatient consultation entirely handled by machines (at some point soon eventually), with no interaction with human doctors at all, the overall need for human doctors themselves will not decline. They'll just be focusing their time on more pressing matters. However, the same cannot be said about a whole host of other occupations and functions tied to the hospital industry, for example, for tasks from record keeping, to appointment bookings, to updating details and patient parameters.

While nurses and other staff you can think of that work in hospitals cannot entirely be replaced for practical operational reasons, the numerical requirements for them can be reduced to the minimal. And so too the manpower costs in terms of compensation and benefits over the long term.

This does not necessarily mean bad news for various categories of medical workers that are not doctors. The last 20 years to 2015 has seen a global population growth of almost 1.5 billion. This population growth will impact the medical sector as such that medical workers will be in under-supply over the next two decades if hospitals continue to operate by the model of the 1990s and the 2000s. In view of this, the precedence of the Humber River Hospital is timely. While an a-Commerce model hospital may have less human staff, or rather to be precise, minimal human staff, human medical workers may be better distributed thanks to the a-Commerce model, to where they may be needed, with their nature of work changing of course. This may present a win-win situation to all stakeholders to the Hospital Industry; hospital owners, medical workers and the society at large.

Harish Shah is Singapore's first local born Professional Futurist and a Management Strategy Consultant. He runs Stratserv Consultancy. His areas of consulting include Strategic Foresight, Systems Thinking and Organisational Future Proofing.