We are working towards creating meaningful innovations: Srinivas Prasad, CEO, Philips Innovation Campus

Philips Innovation Campus organizes their third Digital Healthcare Conclave which focused on why connected healthcare is the need of the hour for our country and how it can solve the existing healthcare problems. In a conversation with EC’s Rachana Jha, Srinivas Prasad, CEO, Philips Innovation Campus, discussed about the challenges, and its solution, in Indian Healthcare. Here are some edited excerpts…

What do you think are the main challenges Indian Healthcare and what are the steps that Philips is taking to overcome them?

Indian healthcare system is burdened with numerous challenges. While it is seen that innovative solutions using digital technologies have been able to address these challenges effectively, there is a long way to go. Connected healthcare solutions are a key to this. But for this to work, it requires an ecosystem where health data is available to care givers. But India lacks a common health data repository. The PHCs (primary healthcare centers), DHCs (District Healthcare Centers) and CHCs (Community Healthcare Centers) are not connected. If we are able to connect these care will be accessible and also become affordable. Philips has been at the forefront of using digital technology in healthcare. Its various connected care solutions have increased accessibility to care in remotest corners of the world, empowered patients to manage their health while also giving health providers tools to improve patient outcomes. With our mission to touch more than 3 billion lives by 2025, Philips is working towards creating meaningful innovations that will make healthcare accessible to all.

How is Philips using digital technology to provide healthcare solutions?

There are numerous solutions that PIC has delivered that keeps Philips abreast with digital technology, some solutions that we have developed and have been successful are as below:

MoM: The Philips Mobile Obstetrics Monitoring (MOM) software solution helps community caregivers and doctors work together to identify and manage high-risk pregnancies, bringing care to where it’s urgently needed: primary health centers and patient homes. MOM features a way for community caregivers to capture vital information so that a clinical decision support (CDS) pregnancy risk level can be calculated. This helps standardize pregnancy risk stratification so that high-risk cases are not missed. Mobile applications connect doctor, caregiver, and patient for diagnostic assistance and progress assessment.

Chest Pain Clinics (CPC):  These CPCs serve as the first point of contact for the patient and are usually run by general physicians or non-interventional cardiologists. The pre-requisite for a CPC is that it should be: Capable of performing ECGs on patient. They are equipped with Philips Efficia ECG 100 an innovative, portable, easy to use ECG machine, with diagnostic quality ECG machine intended for acquisition, recording, measurement, display and printing of simultaneous 12 channel ECG waveforms of patients in ECG room for both in-patient and outpatient. In this model, CPCs will constitute the spokes for the ‘hub’ hospital. Once a patient arrives at one of the spoke CPCs, the local physician evaluates the patient’s symptoms and, performs an ECG via the Philips Efficia ECG 100. This ECG is wirelessly transmitted to the on-call cardiologist. Once Cardiologist reviews the ECG, he instructs the general physician on the next steps for treatment of patient.

IntelliSpace Consultative Critical Care (ICCC) solution: Using the ICCC solution, one can now monitor multiple intensive care units from a central command center that may be located in a geographically separated area. The state of the art hardware and software products that are provided as part of the solution enable clinicians connect to and monitor multiple intensive care units from a central location. Trained Intensivists and intensive care nurses stationed at the command center can monitor the patients in the peripheral ICUs on a 24/7 basis. The solution enables the establishment of a “hub-and-spoke” model where the central command center acts as the hub and the peripheral ICUs act as the spokes. The central command center has multiple “monitoring stations”. The qualified specialists sitting in a command center can effectively guide and advise less qualified care givers functioning at peripheral smaller hospitals.

How is Philips Data Science Platform is doing its part?

This Platform empowers healthcare organizations to spend more time understanding their data, freeing them from the responsibility and expense of building, maintaining and deploying data science capabilities in-house. With these advanced analytics and artificial intelligence methods, organizations can rapidly create predictive models, optimize operational workflow, and accelerate development of analytics offerings.  DSP comes prepackaged with most of the open source tools, frameworks, libraries etc. that data scientists use. DSP comes with a rich set of pertained clinical models for Medical images and clinical reports – that can either be consumed directly within a hospital workflow or by data scientists to build their own custom specific models/apps.

How can technologies like AI, IoT, eases medical access to common people?

We are conducting a pilot study using MOM in Shorapur Taluk in Yadagir District, Karnataka since December 2016. The Clinical Decision Support algorithm in MOM takes into consideration various parameters from the pregnant woman’s obstetrics history and comes up with a pregnancy risk score and risk level for the woman. The algorithm is fairly comprehensive. The output of the algorithm is to classify the risk of the pregnancy. Based on this classification the caregivers can then make critical decisions like referring all high-risk pregnancies to a larger hospital or to an OBGYN specialist. This ensures that a meaningful intervention is made early to address pregnancy complications. This approach is in line with the growing trend of AI applications across different industries including healthcare. The use of AI becomes particularly important for healthcare solutions in low-resourced settings as typically the users tend to be minimally trained and not specialists. The availability of such AI-based solutions makes it easier for the users to ascertain the risk correctly and ensures that chances of missing high-risk factors are significantly reduced. Such solutions complement the medical expertise on the ground in delivering more robust care to the patients.

In next few years what would be the innovations we can see from Philips? Any upcoming projects or programs?

I foresee Philips Innovation Campus coming up with more end to end solutions like the chest pain clinics and extending care into the homes of people. The hub and spoke model of centralized clinical care with delivery happening close to the customer.