We recently spoke with George Valentine, Assistant Vice President of New Growth and Development at Cox Communications for his insights on the impact of leveraging smart hospital technology to power smart communities.
How can IoT be leveraged to streamline traditionally siloed hospital processes and provide higher-level operational insight for the C-suite?
George Valentine, AVP of New Growth and Development at Cox Communications: Automation and process improvement are just two of the benefits that hospitals can expect by leveraging Internet of Things (IoT) technology to provide higher-level operational insight. Here are examples of the many ways hospital operations can streamline through automation, these include:
– Asset Tracking – This traditionally manual task that takes up everyone’s time, administrators, nursing, clinical engineering, environmental services, and facilities. For instance, clinical engineering can spend up to a third of their time and nurses up to one hour per shift simply looking for hospital equipment. Today, hospitals and healthcare facilities can use real-time location software (RTLS) solutions to create actionable location-aware intelligence. This data can instantly locate assets, create dynamic PAR inventory levels, or eliminate workflow bottlenecks.
– Environment Temperature Monitoring – Because various parts of hospitals, or healthcare settings must remain at or within a specific temperature, humidity, or pressure threshold, ensuring that the ideal condition is maintained is mission-critical for the safety of employees and patients.
When done manually, environmental monitoring is time-consuming and leaves room for error. Leveraging environmental monitoring software solutions automates the process, ensures conditions are maintained and can be easily reported on during audits, and will notify staff directly to their devices if the condition in any space needs to be addressed.
– Digital Front Door Alerts – A digital front door refers to the patient portal and virtual map that patients can interact with digitally. Keeping up with appointments and navigating medical facilities can be challenging for many patients. Location-based services that are integrated as part of a hospital’s tech stack create an easy-to-use platform that eases patient stress and ensures smoother operations.
– Hand Hygiene Monitoring – Hand hygiene is a priority at hospitals and healthcare facilities nationwide. As a result, hospitals have implemented expensive and inefficient manual observation processes to ensure that staff and patients are as protected from hospital-acquired infections and illnesses. RTLS can automate, streamline, and improve compliance by digitizing hand sanitization stations to ensure that employees are following the appropriate hand hygiene standards.
Implementing and using these different types of technologies in today’s hospitals benefit all involved in the healthcare industry, as it supports patient safety and outcomes, the employee experience, greater operations efficiency, and cost-saving for facility C-level leadership.
What impact will smart hospital technology have on the patient experience?
Valentine: Smart hospital technology benefits the patient experience in many ways. The first and most important is to support optimal care delivery and recovery. This starts by ensuring that the appropriate equipment is located and provisioned to the patient as quickly as possible while freeing up resources to spend more time providing bedside care. Next, two additional benefits are reducing hospital-acquired infections through the accountability and automation of hand hygiene monitoring and enabling patients and visitors to navigate large campus environments efficiently. And finally, using equipment and people data to improve the critical workflows that impact every facet, from admissions, care, and discharge of the patient experience.
The benefits that smart hospital technology creates in the areas of time saved, greater process efficiency, and real-time data all empower the employees to shift their focus away from these back-end processes and focus more on the patients and their experience and care while onsite.
Cox Business recently surveyed hospital CEOs on their experiences with smart hospital tech and their predictions for the years ahead; 60% said RTLS is a very important aspect of a Smart Hospital, and 10% emphasized it as the most important investment hospital leadership can make.
What are some of the ways the smart hospital can benefit employee experience, efficiency, and interoperability?
Valentine: Our survey results were clear; interoperability is the most critical component of a smart hospital. A smart hospital is increasingly a collection of core platforms that talk to each other in real-time. Gone are the days of implementing point solutions for every single need. One solution for this department, another for this department. A pilot here, a pilot there. The industry even coined the term – pilotitis for the overuse of pilots. Hospitals are increasingly leveraging platforms to operate more efficiently.
Smart Hospital initiatives also play an influential role in clinical staffing and attracting new business. More than eight in ten (84%) hospital executives said these initiatives have a strong or positive impact on attracting and retaining clinical staff. And 74% said these initiatives have a strong or positive effect on attracting new patients and payer networks, which supports the overall health of the hospital’s business and ability to provide exceptional care to its community.
Beyond clinical tools to aid care procedures and diagnosis, operational tools that can automate traditionally manual tasks benefit hospital staff with greater efficiencies and cost savings. But they also benefit the patients because they free medical staff to focus their attention on patients’ care and support.
Can you tell us how hospital leaders today are predicting smart hospital technology and future investments?
Valentine: It’s no surprise technology will power the hospital of the future. According to Cox’s Smart Hospital survey, the emergence of new technology easily polled as the top megatrend driving the move to smarter hospitals.
As hospital leaders consider investment options, we see an emerging theme. Leaders are increasingly asking how technology investments will not only improve patient care but how the technology will reduce costs and drive operational efficiencies. This focus on operational efficiencies ranked high in the survey and comes up in every conversation we have with hospital leaders nationwide.
Regarding specific investments, the survey respondents identified virtual care platforms, augmented reality tools, public and private networks, and cloud adoption emerged as the top areas for clinical and operational technology investments within the next two years.
Looking to the future, our survey findings uncovered one common element: artificial intelligence. When asked to identify the critical aspects of the 2030-era smart hospital, we often hear predictive care models, precision medicine, enhanced remote monitoring, and increased use of health wearables. But in every case, they are coupled with the power of AI to improve and personalize the results.
About George Valentine, AVP & General Manager
George is an entrepreneurial executive and serial entrepreneur successful in launching, growing, and managing technology-based companies. George joined Cox Communication’s Innovation group in 2014 and is responsible for developing, incubating, and executing the company’s Connected Health strategy, including solution and partnership development, investments, acquisitions, and market trials. Prior to Cox, George founded two successful technology companies, performed a venture-backed company turnaround, and led large enterprise projects as a KPMG management consultant. George holds an MBA and B.S. in Finance from the University of South Carolina. George, his wife, and two children live in Atlanta, GA.