Tech companies and Smart Hospitals share an obsession: Collaboration

As an engineer, I gain great satisfaction when technology solves seemingly insurmountable problems. Traditional hospital infrastructure struggles to meet current and future needs. When I was born, the global population was just 3.3 billion. Today we are over 8 billion. That’s a challenge.

Why? Because as people age, we need more healthcare services. That puts hospitals under pressure. They need to deliver high-quality care to meet patients’ rising expectations. At the same time, they need to become more efficient, competitive, and sustainable. No small feat if their infrastructure was designed decades ago.

One such hospital is Kantonsspital Baden AG (KSB) in Switzerland. A modern facility with a long tradition, it has been caring for the sick since 1349, when the Black Death pandemic was decimating Europe. Last year, it served around 22,000 inpatients and 340,000 outpatients. What’s more, it won a digital excellence award for developing a software solution that allows radiologists to remotely control up to three MRI scanners in remote locations. That makes radiologists more efficient and shortens waiting lists.

Thanks to smart technology KSB may soon win more prizes. It is partnering with Siemens to become Switzerland’s most digital hospital and its first truly smart hospital. By next year, 2,000 trackers, 7,000 sensors and a customized, smart hospital platform will digitalize all building operations. The hospital will even have an app to help patients navigate their way around. That saves time.

In a conventional hospital, nurses spend more than an hour of their working day trying to locate equipment. Which is one reason why mobile medical equipment has a utilization rate of less than 40% – and why 10% is lost or stolen. In a smart hospital, trackers and sensors put an end to that by ensuring machines are available when needed.

Breaking down silos with technology

Today, the world’s hospitals generate annual revenue of $4.2 trillion. Yet most of them are inefficient. Most are conventional. Most use old technologies that are siloed and uncommunicative.

That’s good news if your business is a technology company that can combine the real and the digital world – a company that can power the internet of things. More specifically, it’s great news if you’re specialized in smart hospital technologies. Because this is a market with potential to scale. If you shoulder responsibility in business, you’re often exposed to the latest management buzz words. And if you invest time trying to make sense of them, you can often find useful connections.

One such buzz word is collaboration. Managers have been talking about breaking down silos and leveraging the potential of improved cooperation for decades. And for good reason. Working together keeps you ahead of the competition and supercharges your business. Collaboration can turn new inventions into marketable products. Most of all, it can build a culture of innovation.

But what has this got to do with smart hospitals? Easy. What makes hospitals smart is collaboration. Hospitals are smart when they have one common data environment and use that data to integrate all the operational systems for maximum efficiency. That’s innovation. Or to put it another way: The difference between smart hospitals and conventional ones is that all the systems collaborate.

Huge potential for better outcomes

Smart hospitals are versatile and flexible, giving patients a better experience and staff the best working environment. Software systems for building management reduce the carbon footprint by optimizing hardware to improve energy efficiency and building operations. All the systems are fed from one common data lake, whether it’s heating, ventilation and air-conditioning or real-time location services. Smart hospitals are a high-quality, human-centric environment.

To me, that seems to be a goal worth pursuing everywhere. And there is lots of scope for scale. While it is hard to say how many hospitals the world has, because we don’t have an agreed definition, it is safe to say that only a tiny fraction of the 150,000 to 200,000 hospitals across the globe are smart today. To me, that seems like a great opportunity for improvement. A great opportunity creates the best conditions for effective healthcare, for lower CO2 footprints and for optimized operations.

Smart hospitals are the ones where humans work hand in hand for the best patient outcome, and where hardware, software and systems collaborate. By using technology: That’s how we create the best environment for good health and the best patient experience.

And I hope Kantonsspital Baden is the first of many such hospitals in Switzerland.