Smart Industry 2/2018

• AI is also being used to enhance the
knowledge of pathologists from
Harvard identifying the presence
of cancer in biopsies, raising the detection
rate to 99.5 percent.
When combining the back-office efficiency
savings generated from AI handling
patients’ records and hospital
data with the rapid diagnosis of conditions
to assist clinicians, it is clear
that AI and wider machine learning
solutions will play a critical role in the
health-care ecosystem of the future.
Although digitization and automation
of back-office processes are helping
staff spend more time attending to
the needs of patients, constant mobile
communication is an absolute necessity
for staff to collaborate with colleagues,
respond to patient emergencies,
and optimize workflows. Gone
are the days of doctors only being accessible
through a pager – CPaaS solutions
such as ALE Rainbow offer the
capability to integrate specific healthcare
applications and workflows into
the core collaboration service.
Collaborative health care
on the move
By rolling out secure Wave 2 Wi-Fi
throughout the hospital, we can
guarantee continuous availability
and a high-quality user experience for
both staff and patients. Health-care
facilities should also look to adopt a
secure mobile platform for clinicians
to collaborate on, share patient files,
and receive emergency calls. The high
degree of programmability of these
platforms allows existing systems to
be integrated into the same platform
using open APIs, such as nurse calls,
alarm notifications, and alerts in the
event of a patient deteriorating.
With the introduction of secure and
resilient mobile communications,
hospitals can move towards telemedicine
and remote care, providing video
consultations and appointments for
patients who may struggle to regularly
travel for care; this can benefit in
particular citizens living in remote areas
and the elderly or disabled. Offering
these virtual appointments helps
continue the care pathway beyond
patient discharge, ensuring a quality
patient experience and access to expert
support at every stage of assessment,
treatment, and recovery.
Recent security breaches in the news
– ranging from Equifax to Yahoo –
have compromised the details of millions
of consumers worldwide and
pushed data protection to the top of
the agenda. Regardless of the vital
services they provide, hospitals are
not immune from today’s data protection
requirements.
Health care is due for a
compliance check-up
Health-care providers should ask
themselves: is patient data being used
correctly, is it being protected? Are
electronic medical records secured,
only accessible to relevant staff, and
fully compliant with data protection
best practices?
Health care is a particularly high priority
target to hackers due to the
huge amount of sensitive data stored,
ranging from full medical history to
payment details, address, and date
of birth. This could be data theft, or
ransomware – a recent Beazley report
found that 45 percent of all ransomware
attacks targeted the health-care
sector.
To combat this, hospital IT departments
must ensure they operate a fully
secure network and control access
to specific systems and applications
– for example, creating different permissions
for visitor Wi-Fi and clinician
network access. Devices and equipment
requesting network access
should be identified, profiled, and
assigned suitable access rights before
being “set loose” on the network.
IoT devices offer a new angle of attack
for unauthorized access into healthcare
networks, especially if left unsecured,
or rolled out quickly without
careful consideration. By developing
an IoT security strategy, such as the
IoT Containment approach offered
by ALE in which the hospital network
is divided into virtualized segments
without direct access to unrelated systems
on the network, it eliminates the
prospect of a security threat spreading
to other areas of the network and
compromising patient data.
All this data
can not just be
processed but
also analyzed
to generate
valuable patient
and diagnosis
insights.
Healthy development
As the cost of deploying
IoT devices continues
to fall, hospitals
are increasingly able
to connect different
areas of the healthcare
ecosystem.
Connected health care is no longer
just a trend – it is an inevitability as
hospitals look to meet the needs and
expectations of today’s patients.
Connected devices –
helping health care get
personal
As services and applications are increasingly
linked, we can begin to
picture how a typical hospital visit
may unfold. A patient is admitted to
hospital and the assigned clinician is
able to immediately access full historical
medical records on their secure
mobile device. Once scans are completed,
an AI-powered application
analyses the results and aids diagnosis
– sharing a recommended course
of treatment. After consulting with
colleagues via a mobile collaboration
platform, the clinician is able to action
this treatment and offer personalized
patient care and advice throughout
the care pathway.
Care providers are set to benefit from
further developments such as location-based
services for wayfinding,
asset tracking, and staff location. But
health-care facilities must first lay the
infrastructure of a secure, easily scalable
network to take advantage and
reduce risk.
65