Cover Story
Breaking barriers in medicine: taking hospitals to the community
Improving healthcare will require digital technologies that connect systems to each other and those systems to the people
The smart hospital of the future will be“ without walls,” as several headlines and research papers foretell. But what does that actually mean? We’ re talking about hospitals with interconnected systems where a significant chunk of the care currently provided at big comprehensive medical facilities will flow to less specialised centres and the community at large, including to your home. At the same time, hospitals will increasingly focus on those services that require advanced equipment and staff with specialist, or even subspecialist, training, like emergency medicine and surgery.
The hope is that such smart healthcare systems will make the most of digital technologies to improve care by reducing both the need to travel to a few hyperspecialised centres and the time that patients spend in hospitals while also freeing up space, resources, and manpower for patients who really need them.
The prediction of a future hospital without walls isn’ t entirely new as the idea was already floated in 2013 by the Royal College of Physicians in the UK. And while the notion may sound a bit premature considering the current state of affairs in most healthcare systems suffering from lack of funds and overworked medical staff, we can already see trends pointing to a future where hospitals will be much more connected to their communities.
The expansion of telemedicine is a good case in point.
Like many other activities during the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare services were forced to move partially online, allowing continuity of care for many patients and boosting a sector that now seems poised to continue flourishing despite the end of the global health emergency. Indeed, the rate of teleconsultations per patient in the developed OECD countries more than doubled between 2019, when it stood at 0.6, and 2021, and it kept increasing steadily in the following years, according to the OECD paper
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