Dutch giant Philips has added two applications to its HealthSuite range to help drive the digital transformation of healthcare.

Announced at this month’s HIMSS21 conference in Las Vegas, the applications are secure and cloud-based, and intended to break down barriers across patient care in a scalable, cost-effective model.

The Patient Flow Capacity Suite and Acute Care Telehealth applications allow health systems to integrate informatics that can be combined and scaled up or down according to needs. They help health systems through a connected, protected, future-ready and cost-predictive single cloud infrastructure and software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

As care settings expand beyond the hospital, health systems are seeking ways to manage the influx of data while addressing challenges with IT resources and budgets. The adoption of platform-based IT models is on the rise, with more than 30% of global economic activity expected to be mediated by digital platforms in six years, yet experts estimate only three per cent of companies have adopted an effective platform strategy.

HealthSuite securely stores critical healthcare data and provides analytics and AI capabilities, while delivering interoperability to help enable precision care and provide care anywhere. With these added applications, health systems can liberate data from silos and connect them in a way that enables care teams to turn data into actionable insights and collaborate to serve patients.

“Health systems today must continue to evolve to meet the needs of patients and providers, ensuring care is connected across settings and that care can be delivered anywhere, all of which requires agile and secure platforms that will allow them to innovate and scale as demands shift,” said Roy Jakobs, chief business leader for connected care at Philips. “Our cloud-based HealthSuite is a milestone in how it supports the acceleration of digital transformation in health systems to deliver better, patient-centric care, while reducing costs and resources.”

The Patient Flow Capacity Suite logistics offering helps manage the patient journey across the entire care continuum. By taking a holistic approach to care coordination and combining clinical and operational data, it helps provide the visualisation and machine-learning supported analytics that can enable more informed patient flow decisions.

Care is orchestrated in a structured manner across the entire healthcare network, including affiliate networks as well as post-acute settings. The suite connects the front lines with hospital enterprise operations to predict demand systematically, make patient transition decisions and spot patient flow bottlenecks.

Building on Philips’ expertise in tele-ICU, Acute Care Telehealth provides a configurable and flexible way to help health systems realise their virtual care and wider enterprise telehealth ambitions. Its scalability allows health systems to deploy it in a central command centre or in a decentralised model of telehealth dependent on their needs. By allowing users to add additional hospitals, clinical units or beds, it grows as each organisation’s telehealth strategy evolves.

Additional clinical and operational applications will be added to HealthSuite. Next, updates are planned for electronic medical records and acute care and anaesthesia workspace.

This modular approach offers flexible services to solve specific problems, making them easy to implement, install, maintain and use. All benefit from the same SaaS model, which can help lower initial deployment costs and relieve ongoing IT resource strains.

Additionally, the applications allow for easy access to data across care pathways with purpose-built ecosystem services, such as integration with third-party partners. They are secure by design, meeting privacy and security requirements and ensuring systems are always up to date.

They are future-ready in that they enable faster adoption of innovation, allowing health systems to scale within the enterprise and to add applications according to need. The adoption of innovations requires less initial investment and creates a transparent total cost of ownership.

Philips is responsible for all updates and upgrades, allowing IT departments to focus on strategic initiatives rather than maintaining the life cycle of software.

Philips’ informatics products are an integral part of its Care Collaboration collaborative approach to supporting a healthcare organisation’s digital transformation. As health systems seek to manage, coordinate, orchestrate and synchronise care across the health continuum, each organisation’s digital journey will be unique.

Through Care Collaboration, Philips acts as a partner to healthcare organisations to gain an understanding of their problems and determine how HealthSuite can help them support data and workflows to deliver enhanced care.