Symposium 8 - Hospital Transformation and Construction Innovation

Hospital buildings can play a key role in the healing experience of patients. In recent years, hospital planners and architects are adopting the approach of salutogenesis increasingly to design a healthcare milieu that promotes health and enhances patient restoration. It involves supporting patients with General Resistance Resources (GRR) to promote a positive Sense of Coherence (SOC). Salutogenic architectural design covers three main domains: comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness. The three domains address the congnitive, behavioural, and affective needs of the patients. The salutogenic benefits will not only be confined to the patients, but is also highly relevant to the healthcare workers who many are facing burnout situations. Using the example of CUHK Medical Centre, a newly completed private teaching hospital in Hong Kong, the presentation will illustrate how salutogenic principles are applied in the design of a healthcare facility.

After many years of reform, hospitals in China still face many challenges. From patient's perspective, long waiting lines are still common in front of registration window, triage desk and outpatient clinics, creating huge inefficiency in care delivery; from healthcare professional's perspective, long working hours hampered by documentation reducing valuable time that could be spend on patient and family interactions; from operator's perspective, various segmented hardware and software systems lead to information silos, creating obstacles in getting a timely and accurate holistic view of the operating performance. 
Cloud technologies, AI and the latest development in large multi-modal models etc, hold a lot of potential promises to address the aforementioned ingrained issues. For example, AI chatbot can better refer and triage patients to avoid wrong appointments, pre-consult history taking chatbot can improve quality and efficiency of consultation, AI-based clinical decision support system can provide advices in real time. Integrated IoT, sensors and visualization technologies can create a virtual hopsital, providing management a visual platform to understand, track and analyze hospital performances in real-time. These innovative technologies together can help hospitals improve care quality, clinical accuracy, and operating efficiency.