Healthcare 2030? After coronavirus, Israeli hospital has an idea

The initiative was initially supposed to be launched in September, but coronavirus sped things up.

By ROSSELLA TERCATIN
Patient Room of the Future virtual tour, featuring (l-r) moderator Avner Halperin, Prof. Amitai Ziv, Dr. Eyal Zimlichman, and Shimi Ernst, Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, Israel, May 26, 2020 (photo credit: screenshot)
Patient Room of the Future virtual tour, featuring (l-r) moderator Avner Halperin, Prof. Amitai Ziv, Dr. Eyal Zimlichman, and Shimi Ernst, Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, Israel, May 26, 2020
(photo credit: screenshot)
What will a hospital room look like in 2030? And an ICU Unit? The Sheba Medical Center in Tel Hashomer offered several ideas in an online event on Tuesday, presenting its “Patient Room of the Future.” The special environment was created to test, train and combine new tools with the cooperation of both those who developed them and the medical staff that will eventually employ them.
And for many of the technologies introduced, the future is already here.
The initiative was initially supposed to be launched in September. However, the coronavirus crisis not only accelerated the project itself, but also the implementation of many innovative systems and devices that have already proven to be crucial for treating coronavirus patients at Sheba.
“What we are doing every day is to come up with innovative solutions: We are looking outside to find the most exciting start-up companies and inside to design and innovate what is needed to really fulfill the vision for what healthcare should be in the year 2030,” according to Dr. Eyal Zimlichman, Chief Medical Officer and Chief Innovation Officer at Sheba and director of ARC (Accelerate Redesign Collaborate) Innovation Center.
“We had to think of different environments: a normal room, an ICU room, patients at home and so on,” said Sheba Chief Information Officer Shimi Ernst, who focused on the IT aspect of the room.
Ernst added that they considered several categories, such as communication between the doctors themselves, between medical staff and patients and patients and families; medical devices to enable the patients to check themselves and send the data to the control unit; and AI technology to predict a deterioration in the patient’s condition.
“My advice to my team was to open their imagination,” he added.
The event presented the medical journey of a virtual COVID-19 patient assisted with several cutting-edge technologies. This way, 40-year-old Joel Cohen hospitalized with a relatively mild form of the disease was monitored through an app on his cell phone that analyzed his voice to understand if his symptoms were getting worse. When it decided that they were, the doctor spoke to him through a little robot by the Meditemi company – which also allowed the patient to video-call his family – and asked him to check his fever and heartbeat through a telemedicine device by Tyto Care. They both minimized the staff's exposure to infection.
Later on, when the virtual patient is transferred to the ICU, another system placed under his mattress developed by EarlySense allowed the medical staff to monitor his respiratory rate, while a special system analyzed the patient’s urine parameters. An AI program then parsed all the data and predicted a deterioration in his condition. When he was finally ventilated, a ventilation expert guided the nurse to control the device through VR glasses.
“The combination of the work of all our teams provided us with the opportunity to look into the future in a manner that is very active and dynamic,” said Prof. Amitai Ziv, Director of Sheba Rehabilitation Hospital and of MSR – the Israel Center for Medical Simulation during the event. “The advantage is that we could bring here hardware, software and healthcare professionals and try out via a simulation environment those technologies, check if they solve problems, and provide feedback to companies and healthcare providers.”
The panelists highlighted that many of the technologies, developed by both young and more seasoned companies – as well as by fruitful cooperation with the defense industry and the IDF – were already being used in Sheba or elsewhere and were now being brought together and combined to face the coronavirus emergency.
However, they stressed that much more work and many more opportunities and ideas lay ahead – and that the “Patient Room of the Future” will expand even more in the near future.