Symposium 2 –Role of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Modern Healthcare

The Smart Hospital aims to digitally transform the delivery of healthcare in Hong Kong, to enhance the patient experience, increase patient engagement in their own care, and to use automation and data driven workflows to allow our staff to carry provide this care more effectively and efficiently. The Smart Hospital is more than the sum of the Smart products that have been developed. A key component of the Smart Hospital concept is “co-delivery”, a design and development methodology which not only allows much faster deployment of Smart products throughout HA but also encourages the development of better products.
This talk will describe the innovations in product delivery as well as the status and roadmap of the Smart Hospital.

CUHK Medical Centre is a private teaching hospital wholly owned by The Chinese University of Hong Kong. It is the first hospital in Hong Kong designed with “smart” IT infrastructure. The Smart Hospital strategy was developed based on the Triple Aim for healthcare organizations – to promote better health, better care, and better values for the patients. The 3-prong strategy includes the development of a full electronic patient record, the use of mobile technology to support the patients, doctors, nurses, and pharmacists, and the incorporation of Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure. To support the IoT applications, the Hospital is set up with the most updated standard of WiFi, mobile 5G, Ultra-wide Band (UWB), Bluetooth (BLE), and RFID. The IoT technology allows real time location tracking of patients and assets.


However, the IT infrastructure only provides the foundation for the Hospital to become “smart”. In the actual operations, the complicated processes in healthcare often require human adjustments to the system. In the presentation, the cases of billing and managing patients’ own medication are used as examples to illustrates that Smart Hospital development is a learning process. In the case of billing, the complexity in a private hospital goes way beyond the original expectation. Above all, the system would have to cater for the need for unanticipated changes in patient or customer requests. In the case of patients’ own medication, it has to address all prescriptions not entered by the doctors directly using the Medication Order Entry system. Hence, learning to be smart is a journey in the development of the Smart Hospital.

Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) is one of the busiest hospitals in Hong Kong, with hundreds of admissions and discharges every day. Maintaining sufficient bed capacity is always a challenge in the context of escalating service demand due to ageing of the population, especially during the winter period, when access block at the Accident and Emergency Department is not uncommon. 
To tackle these long-standing challenges, QEH, as one of the pilot hospitals in the Hospital Authority to pursue Smart Hospital initiatives, established a Hospital Command Centre (HCC) in October 2020 under the leadership of the Head Office Information Technology and Health Informatics Division (IT&HID) and supported by the Cluster Information Technology Division (KCCIT). The HCC aims to improve the efficiency and quality of patient management by integrating real-time patient-related and logistic data to facilitate patient management and expedite bed turnover. A co-delivery approach was adopted with the involvement of user departments, Administrative Services, KCCIT and IT&HID to develop the system algorithm for linking data and embodying features of various corporate systems to facilitate the operation of the HCC. During the COVID-19 pandemic, building on the foundation of the HCC, a COVID-19 Command Centre Module was quickly set up to manage the frequent flow of COVID-19 patients among various facilities both within and between hospitals by optimising the use of real-time bed statistics, clinical information and resources available.
Looking into the future, AI prediction and Cluster Command Centre are being developed to improve patient management and speed up hospital discharges.