Advantech World Partner Conference: enabling a smarter tomorrow

One of the major topics on the agenda at this year's Advantech World Partner Conference (AWPC) was the future of the healthcare industry and the centralisation of digital healthcare in 'smart hospitals'. Fundamental to the realisation of this vision is the Advantech+ Technology Campus (A+TC), which will act as an R&D base for future healthcare products that host organisation Advantech develops, and provide a direct link between the company and hospitals worldwide. The site is set to officially open in 2014, but the AWPC offered a chance to obtain a sneak preview of the facility.

At the event, Advantech was joined by industry giants within medical computing such as NEC, NDS Surgical Imaging, IBM and Microsoft. Together, they illustrated how the efficiency of the caregiving process can be optimised by feeding wireless solutions into a centralised electronic hospital database; through remote monitoring, treatment becomes more accurate, reactive and fundamentally successful.

During a break at the busy event, Practical Patient Care was given the chance to sit down with Michael Bhagwandien, Advantech's European sales director for medical, to discuss the current state of the European medical computer market, existing hospital IT practices and the evolution of digital healthcare as a whole.

Practical Patient Care: How would you summarise the current state of the medical computer market in Europe? And how does Advantech tailor its approach to hospitals across these different markets?

Michael Bhagwandien: I think that, overall, the European medical computer market is reasonably established. The most established markets are northern Europe, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. In southern and eastern Europe, however, there is less integration taking place, so one must recognise that these markets are price sensitive and require different solutions; in southern Europe, for instance, where significant budgets are being made, pricing can make things very difficult. We feel that we have a strong presence within these markets, particularly in eastern Europe. We see more awareness for medical PC usage and we are well set up in this region.

In terms of our medical products, the set-up is the same throughout the continent: we have channel partners and a global support team in place to best understand the needs of hospitals. You must offer hospitals a complete, comprehensive and ergonomic solution, so products such as monitor mounting arms and handles are important - we ask our channel partners to bundle these in with our panel PC terminal. We never go directly to the hospital, other than to educate them about our products and processes; all the actual sales are done through our channel partners.

Can you explain the importance of Advantech's partnerships with companies such as ClinicAll, IBM and Microsoft?

Those three companies are quite different as partners.

ClinicAll has chosen to work exclusively with Advantech due to our support, reliability and local contacts. Unlike our competitors, we have specialist people in all the key regions, and we work very closely with them on sales, promotion and technology. It makes a tremendous difference when companies like ClinicAll come over here because they can see what we are doing from a local perspective, along with what's happening on our production sites. In turn, this also allows us to help them to extend their reach - for instance, we have 300 sales guys in China and we try to promote their solutions directly through our global channels.

Microsoft has been a partner of ours for a long time as a software company, but now we are more in touch with Microsoft Health. Microsoft's view helps Advantech develop more innovative solutions and I think, as partnerships go, it is a very strong and exciting one.

We work closely with consultancy company IBM to improve our infrastructure and back office, and get our products online to better aid our growth. Ultimately, they are helping us grow our digital healthcare offering.

What do you feel are the key trends shaping the healthcare sector?

In the clinical market - at point of care, which will endure due to the importance of infection control and the increasing need for smarter computing power in the operating theatre - you must be able to display more information on one screen. Space is very important.

In terms of nursing, as we announced at the conference, medical tablets are a big trend because iPads have driven these solutions into hospitals. This is something new for us as they are less industrial than what we have done in the past. We have developed the product because the market needs a Windows-based tablet; iPads are not a great clinical solution for this reason. It was also important to us that we make our tablet lighter than existing ones.

How are you going to convince hospitals that have already integrated iPads into their daily activities to move away from them and opt for Advantech tablets?

The key reason they would shift is the software. It isn't really a case of us pushing this tablet to the hospitals, but rather than they have tried iPads and seen that they do not work for security, fragility reasons and available programs.

iPads have been so popular because they allow doctors to work wirelessly. With Windows, however, you can more easily connect to the back end and introduce the normal programs that doctors use. I think what iPads have done is great: they have given us a push by proving the desire for wireless solutions, and have confirmed our belief that wireless technology is the future of healthcare.

We toured the new A+TC facility; how important is this facility going to be in helping Advantech develop its business going forward?

The A+TC is quite new for Advantech; it is the first such campus we have opened - we will open a second in Taiwan in 2014 - and from what I have seen, and discussions with Microsoft, there is an opportunity to co-develop and innovate together, and see how innovations - such as the Kinect 2.0 - can be useful in the healthcare market.

The A+TC is more like a chance to try out new technology, see how to adapt it to the healthcare market and then speak directly to the hospitals with R&D guys. It is the next thing we are doing - co-developing with and really listening to hospitals and what they need. I think this step is really important, otherwise we are running the risk of missing out on market trends.

In the various presentations, such as the keynote speeches, it was very clear that Advantech is focusing on three areas within the digital healthcare sector. What are these areas and why does Advantech feel they are so important?

These are nursing care, patient infotainment and critical care.

We are well established and well known in critical care with our point-of-care terminals, while we are relative newcomers in nursing.

About two years ago, we released our trolleys, the difference being that we offer computerised trolleys - the computer is inside the cover or on top as a panel PC, giving hospitals the ability to have the same type hospital-wide - and that our trolleys are set up specifically to accommodate multiple accessories, such as panels. So if a hospital is seeking a complete workstation, we are well positioned because that is our target end user: the caregiver who needs to bring multiple accessories to the patient.

With the trolley, you can do patient monitoring, critical care solutions and medication. We provide different medication-dispensing automations and the trolley is developed to be narrow so that it can travel easily throughout wards, which is not normally the case. Most competing trolleys are too big, too wide and are stationed in the hallway, increasing the likelihood of mistakes. We want to bring the medication dispenser, all other accessories and the computer to the patient so their health - and medication - can be safely monitored and electronically recorded. This will bring much improvement to hospitals.

In the past we had a tablet, the MICA, which was developed together with Intel. This was too heavy and we now see a need for a pocketable tablet with Windows. This was demonstrated at the exhibition and will be releases in April 2014.

The third aspect is patient infotainment - another area that involves bringing care to the patient's bedside.

One of the key concepts put forward at the conference was the 'smart city'. How do you see Advantech fulfilling this concept?

Our vision is that of the Internet of Things: enabling a smarter and more intelligent planet. From there, you have of course the 'smart city', which is the theme of this conference, and below that the 'smart hospital'.

I am originally from Advantech's industrial automation sector and I think there is a big opportunity for our company to help hospitals get smarter through the use of more intelligent technology. What we want to do is follow in the footsteps of automated factories, where we can remotely monitor machines and service them when they are not in use, thus preventing them failing at a later date.

The same concepts are useful in a hospital setting: you want to know what is being done and at what point patients require care. It will be ideal when colleagues can electronically monitor and discuss patients' treatment, and share health records with other doctors because, when done on paper, it is hard and labour intensive.

By making it electronic and digital, hospitals will be able to use RFID and wireless technologies to track and trace what is going on with the patient and where they are. To this end, in 2014, we are set to release new wireless patient monitoring technology so that nurses, for instance, can see a patient is in a particular room and won't have to do their rounds to locate them. We believe that efficiency and patient care will increase a lot as a result of these kinds of technologies.

Do you think this new 'smart healthcare' concept will be easily transported into existing hospitals, or is it better suited to new-build facilities?

This is an interesting question that we discussed at length at this conference, particularly with Microsoft and NEC. The main thing that is stopping new technology and innovation from entering hospitals is the infrastructure.

If you look at most hospitals, the infrastructure is quite old: they have telephone lines and TV, but they do not wish to replace these lines as this would be too expensive. New hospitals, however, are completely different because they have wireless in place - they have the wide bandwidth and they have taken into account the new technologies that can be used in the future. So, yes, in older hospitals, it is sometimes a problem to upgrade technologically; it is not the hospitals themselves that give us problems, but the aged infrastructure.