Sustainability and healthcare often are not discussed together. But given growing patient populations and the reality that half the world does not have access to essential health services, sustainability needs to be at the top of the healthcare agenda.

Building more hospitals and finding and hiring more doctors, nurses and technicians to address this demand is simply not sustainable.

That was the consensus of panelists speaking during a discussion on sustainability and healthcare at the recent GE-hosted Spotlight Tomorrow event held at the USA Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai. Participants included Mohie Elrafey, Head of Strategic Marketing for GE Healthcare Europe, Middle East and Africa; and Andre Daoud, CEO of Medcare Hospitals & Medical Centres, a UAE-based medical group.

To address this challenge, healthcare must evolve to increasingly implement AI and digital transformation, deploy more portable and affordable types of medical diagnostic technologies to reach more remote populations, and even adopt futuristic technologies, such as vests that could perform mammograms or diabetes tests that monitor tears in the eye.

The power of digitalization and AI can help hospitals and clinics evaluate and treat more patients with higher quality care by optimizing both workflows and the use of medical imaging equipment. GE Healthcare’s Command Center ingests the 50 petabytes of data produced by hospitals every year to improve operational efficiencies for improved care to more patients with fewer clinicians.

AI can give clinicians more time to spend with patients by eliminating routine and reporting tasks, and shortening imaging scan times through better patient positioning and improved image quality.

Increased digitization can eliminating data silos, thereby giving clinicians a more holistic view of the patient for better diagnosis and treatment. Ultimately, this is the promise of precision healthcare, which will use detailed information on patients, including genetic analysis and the data coming of healthcare wearables, combined with big data on millions of other patients to give doctors much better insights into the precise treatment required for each patients. It also will inform better wellness and preventive care, resulting in fewer people needing to go to the hospital in the first place.

More broadly, these approaches and technologies will make health systems more resilient and prepared to meet the needs of patients in coming decades.

To view this 25-minute discussion, click the link below.
https://bit.ly/3l1bC6c