Innovations from HP Labs improve patient care -- one day at a time

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I was reading the recent edition of HP Industry Edge Health and Life Sciences edition with great interest. On Page 10, you will see how key innovations from HP Labs have been applied in the Healthcare industry to improve overall patient experience at hospitals. As I read this article by Jaap Suermondt, Lab Director, Services and Solutions Research Lab, Director of Healthcare Research, HP Labs, I slowly began to digest the practical significance of these innovations. It lead me to visualize how a day in the life of a patient at a hospital could be thanks to these innovations.

The following 5 areas come to mind from a patient’s perspective. Let us see how these innovations address our patient experience in each of these areas:

Scheduling your treatment. As patients, we need to schedule the appropriate treatment, which may involve the timely availability of the right equipment, medical personnel, operation rooms, post-surgery rooms, etc. One of the HP Labs’ innovations is an integrated scheduling system based on forecasting, simulation and mathematical optimization, which has resulted in significant improvements in peri-operative performance indicators. There are 3 key components to this scheduling system:

• Statistical estimation of surgery durations
• Surgery scheduling optimization
• Discrete-event simulation to estimate next day metrics.

Dynamic rescheduling has also been added to deal with unforeseeable uncertainties. You will find more details in the article.

Compliance with regulations. Patients would derive comfort from the knowledge that hospitals have the appropriate mechanisms in place to ensure compliance with various healthcare regulations. HP Labs has created a patient safety dashboard that provides a unit-wide overview as, well as detailed safety indicators (e.g., identifying the risk for catheter-associated bloodstream infection [CABSI] and ventilator associated pneumonia or VAP). This dashboard is integrated with the hospital's electronic health records (EHR). After the implementation of this dashboard, a change in care was necessary for 1 out of 3 patients at this hospital.

Service Level. Recovering patients after the procedure need to have their vital signs, like heart and respiratory rates, efficiently and accurately monitored. Hello sensors from HP Labs! These sensors send subtle signals that help professionals keep continuous tabs on the well-being of the patients.

Privacy Protection. Of course, what patients go through is information that is private to them. Patients are deeply concerned about the privacy and confidentiality of their health issues, their treatment, as well as their personal details. HP Labs has a cryptography-based mechanism in place that enables different levels of access to different sections of the same document on a need-to-know basis.

Post-treatment analysis. Information about patients continues to be captured in various structured and unstructured forms including physical and nursing notes, discharge summaries, images, annotations to orders, etc. HP Labs provides novel algorithms and methodologies that can be effectively applied to amazing analytics tools from HP Autonomy to process such data and turn it into consumable information for analysis. Remember Stouffer Egan turning the tables on computers at HP Discover 2012?

The HP Industry Edge Health and Life Sciences edition has several other articles of great interest highlighting the delivery of outcomes that matter within the Healthcare industry.

How about you? Have you had a chance to peruse this e-Zine? What are some of the other innovative applications that come to your mind within the Healthcare industry? I would be interested to know. What about the wearable devices that matter to people we care about?

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