Eye on TechEye Leading Edge Tech Continues To Revolutionise Healthcare

The rise of technologies such as sensors, robotics and digital therapeutics is changing that, opening up a world of care focused on the individual that improves outcomes throughout life.

By shifting routine medical treatments to the home, patients can receive the same level of care without having to travel to a medical centre, reducing journey times, removing the chance of exposure to disease, lowering anxiety – and basically giving them more of their regular life back. But making that change is not as simple as it sounds.

“Moving care out of a medicalised environment requires deep human insights – understanding people’s preferences, behaviours, cultures and experiences, and how they interact with technologies designed to support them,” says Stephen Morehouse, a life sciences expert at PA. “Only by intensely studying the individual, and taking that insight into design, can the technologies create outcomes that are truly life-changing.”

New technologies have enabled us to improve care by bringing it closer to the patient. A flagship project for PA’s chief innovation officer Frazer Bennett, was with Monica Healthcare, now part of GE Healthcare, where the team combined human-factor insights with smart-sensor tech to create wearables that monitor the health of babies, even before they were born, while the Owlet Smartsock, created by design experts in the same team, watches over sleeping infants in the home, tracking vital signs using pulse oximetry that was previously restricted to hospital use.

“Value in these innovations scales in all directions; babies are protected, mothers are reassured, and this safer and better experience also frees up precious resources like much-needed hospital beds and staff, creating efficiencies for the healthcare system as a whole,” explains Frazer. “Making it personal, thinking about where activity happens can not only personalise the experience for users, patients and customers, but also have profound commercial, economic and societal advantages”.

The good news is that it’s increasingly possible to have a personalised experience, at scale and pace. At the onset of Covid-19, British local authorities needed to check in on clinically vulnerable citizens who were shielding at home. In one local authority alone, that number totalled 53,000 people. Given Covid19 restrictions, it was impossible to hire enough people to individually call – or physically visit – all affected individuals. The authority needed a solution, fast, and contacted PA’s team.

Within a matter of days, the PA team conceived, designed and implemented a new system – the Wellbeing Automated Call Service. Using their deep insights of patient behaviours, the team created a human-replicating experience, and used Amazon Web Services’ Connect platform to make outbound bot calls to 200,000 people. “If they needed help, the bot triaged the request and patched the individual through to a human call-handler,” explains Nick Wake, an agile delivery expert at PA. The real surprise? How warm the response was from patients, who talked to the bot like a human being and fed back that – in a really worrying time – the call made them feel valued and cared for.

“The really exciting thing about the approach is that the core technique – quickly repurposing existing technologies and combining them with deep behavioural insight – is applicable across any industry,” says Steve Carefull, an operational improvement expert at PA. “The same technology could, for example, be used for ‘back to work’ readiness calls to tens of thousands of employees post-Covid-19,” he says, “or in any situation where information needs to be quickly and consistently shared, be it to customers, employees or patients.”

Innovative technologies can lead to incredible outcomes. Yet there’s often a danger they’ll not be embraced by the user and fall flat. Take the use of robots. A care home in England might not be the place you’d expect to see a Japanese robot exoskeleton in action – yet the PA team delivered Europe’s first care sector collaborative robots (or cobots), which allow external exoskeletons to protect carers as they deliver physical care such as lifting and moving patients. With careful training, a thoughtful roll-out and deep attention to how the users experienced the technology, the results were fantastic. As Lesley Grant, a healthcare expert at PA says: “It enables more personalised care for the patients and maintains their dignity and privacy.”

In Norway, robots are mimicking consumer products to remind patients when to take their medication and control the quantity available, speaking directly to the patients and communicating other information through light and text displays. “One of the patients using the robot was in his 40s and had Parkinson’s disease, and had to take his medicine at exactly the right time,” explains Grete KvernlandBerg, Norway country head and government expert at PA. “He went from staying at home more or less in his bed, to going out on skis. Another patient likes her robot so much she brings it with her everywhere.” The benefits from the programme included reduced amounts of home visits, increased feelings of safety, positive health effects and boosted levels of activity.

The outlook is nothing but exciting, with a range of new technologies set to personalise care ever further. Take, for example, continued advances in genome sequencing. Before long, scientists are expected to have the ability to create a genetic blueprint for every individual, providing physicians and pharma and biotech companies with an invaluable tool to develop bespoke therapies and treatment regimes.