Health Continuum Space: Enabling a Co-creation of Future Healthcare Innovations

Early this year, Royal Philips launched the Health Continuum Space, the first-of-its-kind innovation facility in Singapore to contextualise the entire journey across the health continuum. This means that the Space will facilitate collaboration with governments, healthcare professionals and stakeholders to design and co-create future healthcare facilities and hospitals.

An initiation like this is a key catalyst that will move Singapore towards higher standards in healthcare – our country offers the world’s fourth best healthcare infrastructure¹ and is the world’s third lowest in infant mortality and seventh highest in life expectancy². With our positive economy, strategic location, rich talents and a dynamic biomedical sciences network, Singapore is a regional gateway for medical, research and pharmaceutical organisations to improve the delivery of healthcare with local institutions.

One of the healthcare challenges here is to maintain a balance in the demands and rising costs, and technology is a fundamental enabler that can help eliminate challenges and maintain the desired balance. As Singapore keeps motivated in driving innovation and providing good and affordable healthcare for the public, advanced establishments like the Health Continuum Space can help our healthcare system to achieve enhanced clinical outcomes and facilitate greater cost and operational efficiencies.

A Fully-Configurable Facility

Housed in the Philips APAC Centre in Singapore, the 1,028 square-metre Health Continuum Space is fully-equipped with various Philips healthcare solutions and equipment, enabling prototyping and co-creation of new solutions that will help make a meaningful difference in the future of patient care and clinical workflows.

In view of the rapid ageing population that Singapore expects to see in the near future, and for the benefit of patients who need medical support, the Health Continuum Space has the capability to contextualise multiple health-medical scenarios at the same time.

Using a continuous co-create approach that is an important aspect of Philips’ design, the fully-configurable facility brings together different environments and medical scenarios to help various stakeholders visualise the entire health continuum, in order to illustrate a patient’s experience from living healthily at home, to being diagnosed and treated for an illness. The continuum includes a home setting, ambulance, emergency room, CT room, catheterisation laboratory, ICU and even a recovery room.

The objective of having this concept is to redefine the way healthcare professionals work collaboratively, which will in turn enhance the quality and efficiency of clinical diagnosis. The Space also features a futuristic Reading Room – an aspirational facility equipped with the latest technological system and interface that consolidates patient data, allowing clinicians of various specialties to review patient cases on one single platform.

With a focus on the health continuum and the role homes have in supporting prevention and healthy living, the Health Continuum Space also highlights personal health innovations and scenarios that can foster and support patient needs pre or post-hospitalisation.

How Health Continuum Space Will Help Healthcare Professionals

Through the simulation and contextualisation of different environments, Philips is able to demonstrate and test workflows that can be used to build future healthcare models with partners. The Health Continuum Space aims to bring to life and visualise the entire continuum of care – a core focus for Philips as the gap between the consumer and healthcare world narrows.

“Customisation and simulation of clinical spaces is important for us healthcare professionals. The Health Continuum Space helps us make informed decisions earlier, and fosters collaboration, integration of care and communication between partners from various specialties to find plausible solutions to enhance hospital workflow efficiencies and bring to life the future of healthcare systems we are aiming to establish to enable better patient and clinical outcomes,” said Dr. Nikolas Wanahita, Medical Director, Gramercy Heart and Vascular Centre, Mount Elizabeth Novena Hospital, Singapore.

1 – According to the IMD World Competitiveness Yearbook 2009.

2 – WEF Global Competitiveness Report 2009-2010.