Over the past few months, we’ve seen organisations, large and small, quickly shift or scale to develop solutions to address the needs of both patients and hospitals. The need for healthcare organisations to become solution providers to co-effect outcomes and make fragmented hospital systems more efficient is more crucial than ever – and technology plays a key role.
Many digital solutions have been well documented in mainstream media, such as telehealth and AI, and rightly so. Addressing the need for patient follow-up and monitoring when they couldn’t get to the hospital or were too afraid to, remains critical. But other innovations haven’t received the same attention, despite their incredible impact. I’ve observed three areas in particular that deserve to be mentioned.

Patient safety and access to high quality, affordable care is a global priority. Systems are under increasing pressure and digitisation provides the scale we need to manage the increased demand while maintaining safety.

With surgery, consistency is king. But COVID-19 has created standardisation challenges with the introduction of new infection prevention procedures and the increased rotation of staff. Hospitals in Italy and the UK quickly adopted a COVID-19 digital surgical workflow platform to support surgical teams in the OR. The platform has enabled them to efficiently onboard new team members during the pandemic, to provide the best possible outcomes for patients.

The pandemic has forced many hospitals to transform to accommodate coronavirus patients, and most elective surgeries have been impacted. Surgeons are facing inactivity and have re-sized their practices, but the need for innovative resources that enable the continuum of care has never been more important during such a rapidly fluctuating environment.

The Johnson & Johnson Institute, the training and learning centre for HCPs, rapidly expanded its education ecosystem with the development of a new COVID-19 Community Hub.

Additionally, leveraging new technology through partnerships with other companies mean that we’re now able to offer surgeons the capability to practice procedures via VR which allows us to focus on the safety and predictability of outcomes in a way that’s more time efficient, cost effective and measurable.

We saw some unprecedented behaviour during the pandemic which impacted on the availability of products and resources across the world. To maintain supply chain stability and reduce any impact on our customers and patients we turned to digital tools to restore balance. To circumvent unnecessary stockpiling, we used data science to monitor typical order patterns and flag major deviations, alerting supply chain professionals to investigate further. When COVID-19 first broke out in Italy, variable staffing levels at manufacturing plants due to community exposure to the virus or government requirements to quarantine at home presented a challenge.

Automated scenario risk simulation technology, which uses real-time data about staffing levels and typical production rates to make predictions about different worst-case scenarios that could occur, enabled supply chain managers to plan ahead instead of being forced to react in an emergency.

I could not be more inspired by how the industry is coming together, in partnership of each other to make sure we have safe environments in hospitals and serve our patients in a different way using technology.