Do no harm may be the guiding principle of modern medicine, but over the last two years, many hospitals around the world have broken this cardinal rule by storing data in systems that actually made it harder for their medical staff to deliver care.
However, CUHK Medical Centre in Hong Kong has solved that problem by integrating advanced comms technologies, including cloud with healthcare applications.
Hospitals are usually organized around traditional divisions, building infrastructure, IT infrastructure, equipment, departments and so on. But CUHK Medical Centre isn't like that. Everything here is data — biometric data, closed-loop logistics and location data, telemedicine video data — all being used in near real time by those applications that make up the clinical ecosystem.
In this video, Stephen M Saunders MBE, founder of Silverlinings, tours CUHK Medical Centre to find out how it is caring for patients using technology that helps doctors better care for their patients. Saunders speaks with Dr. Hong FUNG, JP, CEO, CUHK Medical Centre, Michael FUNG, Chief Information Officer, CUHK Medical Centre, and Wilson SOO, Principal IT Manager, CUHK Medical Centre.
Watch the video or read the transcript below to learn more about CUHK Medical Centre and how it’s using private 5G, location data, video and more to help doctors save lives.
Steve Saunders: Would you like to know what hospitals of the future will look like? I can show you that right now. And I don't need a time machine to do it.
First, do no harm. That's a guiding principle of modern medicine. But over the last two years, many hospitals around the world have broken this cardinal rule in storing it systems that actually made it harder for their medical staff to deliver care.
This is CUHK Medical Centre in Hong Kong and I've traveled 8,000 miles to visit it because it's solved that problem by integrating advanced comms technologies, including cloud with healthcare applications.
Dr. Hong FUNG, JP, CEO, CUHK Medical Centre: The CUHK Medical Centre is a private teaching hospital wholly owned by the Chinese University of Hong Kong. We are contributing to the Hong Kong government’s reform initiative in the private sector, trying to bridge the gap between public healthcare and private healthcare in Hong Kong.
Hospitals are usually organized around traditional divisions, building infrastructure, IT infrastructure, equipment, departments and so on. But CUHK Medical Centre isn't like that. Everything here is data — biometric data, closed-loop logistics and location data, telemedicine video data — all being used in near real time by those applications that make up the clinical ecosystem.
Dr. Hong FUNG, JP, CEO, CUHK Medical Centre: Right from the outset, when we designed the system, we want to make it very clinically friendly to the clinicians, to the doctors, to the nurses to other health professionals, so they were in the driving seats in developing the system to make sure that it would dovetail with their workflow.
Michael FUNG, Chief Information Officer, CUHK Medical Centre: All these IT systems and components within this hospital are a pretty complex system which covers the whole patient journey, from the patient, booking, admission to triage consultation and then during the stay at the hospital until the patients are discharged. So, we had to build the system from scratch within a short period of time — that's probably less than three years’ time. So that was very challenging. We're utilizing some quite new technologies — some of these, when we were still planning the hospital, were not commonly used in a hospital environment.
Wilson SOO, Principal IT Manager, CUHK Medical Centre: We have deployed different wireless technology here and ultra-wide broadband is one of them. We deploy this wristband to patients, and we can see on the map where their location is in the hospital in real time to make sure a patient with dementia or a pediatric patient doesn't get lost in the hospital. Once the patient is out of the range of the ward, our clinical staff will get an alert both on the system and also on their mobile devices.
Saunders: One of the most exciting uses of technology in this hospital comes from Huawei, which is using millimeter wave radar technology to perform contactless biometric measurements so they can measure things like a patient's respiratory rate or their heart rate without any physical contact with the patient at all. And using this sensor in the ceiling, they can also tell if a patient has changed position, for example, if they fallen and need help.
Wilson SOO: The CUHK Medical Center is the first hospital in Hong Kong to have full 5G coverage in the hospital premises. Being a teaching hospital, we often need to hold classes to medical students. Doctors can share mock classes live-streamed to the auditorium where the medical student now the professor can communicate with the students to teach them how to do surgeries in real time.
Saunders: Adding digital technology to healthcare is nothing new. Hospitals around the world have made massive investments in increasingly advanced IT systems since the turn of the century. But the results have been mixed. Just adding digital technology into hospitals can cause more problems than it solves, creating digital silos that complicate workflow for the frontline care teams.
CUHK Medical Centre here in Hong Kong has eliminated that problem by focusing on tight integration of the new technologies with the healthcare applications. In other words, it has successfully created one of the world's first fully integrated digital clinical ecosystems.
Dr. Hong FUNG, JP: At the pharmacy, the dispensing process is automated. We’ve got the administrative process for the nurses automated. Our patient linen uniforms and everything, there are RFID tag and that helps a lot, not only in managing the inventory of all the linens, but also with the manpower required for all of these different processes as well. Manpower is important because healthcare on the whole is manpower intensive. It's not just the doctors, nurses, physical therapists and all that, but there's also a lot of people managing the software at the backend/back-of-house for the patient care processes. So, automation actually does help to reduce the manpower needs, and this is especially important in Hong Kong because in Hong Kong manpower cost is expensive.
Saunders: CUHK Medical Centre here in Hong Kong isn't just a digital hospital. The team here has undertaken the development to move that paradigm forward, transforming it into one of the world's first smart hospitals.
Dr. Hong FUNG, JP: The way we finance healthcare, the way we deliver health care is going to be different, and ICT —the use of modern technology, information technology – certainly will have an important role to play.
Saunders: Do you think deploying next-generation technology as you have done has actually saved lives here at your hospital?
Dr. Hong FUNG, JP: Definitely. Patient safety is a very important aspect nowadays in managing patient care, and the ICT system is so indispensable for us to have better control all these potential human errors that take place in a human-intensive process. We, as a provider, we have to work with the patient on one hand, and we have to work with the players on the other hand, to create the total value. This is a brand-new sort of system that we are establishing. So hopefully we'll be able to move faster.
Saunders: That was an extraordinary facility. I know that if one of my family or friends needed treatment, this is the place that I would want to look after them.