Plenary VI - Smart Hospital Development

The design of China's health security system balances fairness and efficiency, providing reliable medical care and public health services to the world's most populous country. The number of public hospitals in China is huge, and high-level medical personnel are concentrated, making them the main force of the health security system. With partial government funding support, such a massive service system increasingly needs to maintain the efficiency and benefits of hospitals through refined operations, achieving a subtle balance between revenue and expenditure and slight surplus, while reflecting the public welfare of public hospitals and maintaining sustainable development. Intelligent operation comprehensively uses cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things, mobile Internet, artificial intelligence and other technologies. Through the establishment of an interconnected, perceptive and intelligent data center warehouse, it opens up the previously built hospital information islands, integrates medical resources, optimizes service processes, standardizes diagnosis and treatment behavior, and improves diagnosis and treatment efficiency. The smart operation management system needs to achieve real-time and reliable data capture, clear logic, intuitive and visual, and have a tripartite interface between managers, medical staff, and patients, thus becoming the core of a smart hospital.

Emergency Department (ED) overcrowding is a global phenomenon, resulting in admitted patients in the ED, and new patients waiting in the ED waiting rooms to be seen. Meanwhile, a significant portion of these patients in the waiting room could potentially be managed away from ED. How can telehealth and digital health assist in decongesting ED and support patients at their times of urgent needs? This presentation will discuss about the provincial approach the province of British Columbia, Canada takes in tackling this issue through the 8-1-1 virtual service. This pan-provincial digital front door aspires to improve patient experiences, reduce ED input volume, and improve patient safety through their health system journeys for optimizing patients and health system's outcome. We will discuss the evidence to date on this 8-1-1 virtual care service, and how it integrates with the health system as a whole to alleviate the ED crisis in BC, and this line's future directions. We will then explore whether there may be opportunities of synergy between Hong Kong and Canada on utilizing such a system in our respective contexts.