HealthchainStories
VIRTUAL ACUTE CARE
Efficiency in Every Alert
The need
Rijnstate hospital aimed to optimize patient telemonitoring by addressing the inefficiency of managing multiple fragmented systems. The Virtual Care Center (VCC) lacked a unified overview of all telemonitored patients at home, especially for prioritizing those exceeding vital sign thresholds. This fragmentation created an operational burden and hindered the ability to scale remote monitoring services to a larger patient population effectively.
The HealthChain Support
HealthChain supported Healthcare Organisations in identifying their innovation challenges and selecting companies to address them. They worked closely as an interregional team to co-create, test, and validate a solution aligned with real clinical workflows, patient needs, and organisational constraints. The project provided financial and business support to boost the solution’s market-readiness and commercialisation.
The
Solution
The Virtual Acute Care (VAC) platform brings fragmented data together into a single, centralized platform. It integrates and presents relevant, prioritized clinical information from different telemonitoring applications into one unified patient view. This technology enables the clustering and categorization of patients by care level, fostering improved workflow efficiency, time management, and collaboration between hospital and primary care professionals.
Virtual Acute Care (VAC) platform aims to integrate multiple telemonitoring systems used by the VCC into a single dashboard. In addition, it was specifically designed to enable the hospital to scale remote monitoring to larger patient groups without proportional increases in staffing, and to be integrated with existing Electronic Medical Records (EMR) via an iframe for streamlined clinical workflows.
Impact
The solution was designed to address fragmented data in the hospital’s Virtual Care Center (VCC) by creating a unified patient view from multiple telemonitoring systems. Its impacts include:
Workflow Efficiency: It streamlines the VCC by clustering and categorizing patients based on their care level and prioritizing clinical information for those who need immediate attention (e.g., those exceeding vital sign thresholds).
Improved Quality of Care: It enables remote supervision and protocolized work, facilitating better collaboration between hospital staff and primary care providers.
Technological Integration: The solution integrates several telemonitoring systems, such as Luscii, and Guardian, into a single platform to reduce the time spent switching between different applications.
Patient Outcome and Empowerment: By enabling outpatient management from home, it alleviates strain on hospital resources and empowers patients with chronic conditions to participate actively in their care.
Outcomes
The solution was tested in a real-world clinical setting to assess its ability to bring together fragmented data:
- The solution integration was successfully achieved with the telemonitoring systems Luscii (18 care pathways) and Guardian (1 care pathway), with plans for further expansion.
- A total of 9 users was trained on the VAC
- The solution was connected to 3 integration partners in place.
Sustainability
The sustainability of the Virtual Acute Care pilot reflects a mix of successful integration and strategic shifts:
Pilot Termination and Evaluation: Following the official pilot phase and an extension, a mutual decision was made not to continue with the specific implemented solution at Rijnstate Hospital after careful evaluation, due to the significant decrease of users on some of these integration services.
Scale-Up Strategy: Despite the pilot’s end at Rijnstate, the scale-up plan for Virtual Acute Care remains focused on transitioning outpatients from population management to high-care inpatient settings.
Regulatory Compliance: Sustainability is supported by Philips’ internal processes to ensure the software meets EU Medical Device Regulation (MDR) standards and local certifications for target markets.
Ongoing Support and Training: To ensure long-term adoption in other regions, Philips leverages its existing multilingual support structure and provides extensive training for healthcare professionals to adapt to new clinical workflows.