With ever-rising healthcare cost and ageing population (care providers included), a SMART hospital is highly sought after. It can only be built over time with iterations, and start small with a segment of care. We chose operating theatres (OTs) as it is an area that inefficiencies are costly (time and manpower) and talents are vulnerable to turnover.
In Singapore General Hospital, our OTs build several innovations with the following tenets - safety, synchrony, sustainability and social, which is applicable to many other healthcare areas.
We built robotic systems to help with equipment support in the OTs. They are Gonzales for sterile delivery of surgical instruments during surgery and Goldfinger for sorting, checking and packing of clean surgical instruments.
Our lessons learnt include needed data type may not be routinely collected. Existing infrastructure and its connectivity to the equipment may not exist. Workflow needs to be adapted to new innovation and the workforce needs to prepared for re-training.
The definition of value creation should be diverse and beyond that of finances. With the world-wide insatiable need for healthcare provider, both patient’s and staff experiences must be added in our equation for healthcare value.