Amidst this second wave of the pandemic, we are essentially facing the same problems encountered in the past months, namely overcrowding in emergency rooms, exponential growth in intensive care units, and staff forced to work at exhausting paces without this immense effort translating into a substantial step change for the National Health Service.
How do we get out of this situation and what interventions should we plan to avoid being unprepared for future emergencies or simple peaks in facility access?
How can we better protect healthcare personnel and make the system more effective, a system which, despite its excellence, still seems anchored to outdated dynamics?
How can we find solutions that ensure a return on investment not only in terms of service quality but also in concrete savings?
The virus that has disrupted the world over the past year has highlighted certain critical issues that need to be addressed.
Without a doubt, in some cases, the structural renovation of certain hospital wards, particularly emergency rooms and intensive care units, is necessary. However, it is equally true that this must be accompanied by more efficient use of human resources and machinery, especially in the most delicate areas, such as emergency rooms, intensive care units, and operating rooms.
What still seems to be missing in the overall vision of the system is a plan for efficiency and safety through IoT tools.
We know we have professionals whose competence and training are envied by the world, but too often we do not find the same excellence in the operational support tools: consider the most critical and delicate moment within healthcare facilities, namely the proper functioning of operating rooms.
Lean management, the streamlined approach to management dynamics through the use of IoT, signifies the shift from the logic of mere medical acts to the management of flows where the surgical act becomes even more effective and efficient if integrated into the overall management flow.
Literature shows that governance over the entire perioperative process can create a virtuous system that significantly improves the efficiency and performance of operating rooms, while drastically reducing the chances of errors due to fatigue or stress. A technologically advanced system, viewed through the lens of continuous reparameterization of data automatically collected by the system, guarantees accurate and concrete information that enables a sort of “active control” throughout the entire process and better productivity of hospital facilities.
All this translates not only into greater safety for doctors and patients but also into cost reductions, with funds that can then be invested in other areas.
