Businesses worldwide are embracing digital transformation. In the past decade, many organizations have ramped up their digital efforts in order to overhaul their business processes and improve the customer experience. The same can be said of the healthcare sector and medical imaging specifically. Through a variety of digital initiatives, healthcare as an enterprise is changing the way it is performing its workflows and improving its patient outcomes. Middle East Health spoke to Ahmed Alkhatib, Sales Manager Healthcare MEA at Barco, to learn more about some of the most prominent digital imaging trends in healthcare today.
Middle East Health: Where does the need for digital transformation in healthcare come from?
Ahmed Alkhatib: Digitization is permeating all aspects of the healthcare industry. This is driven by a need to deliver a better patient experience, more favorable patient outcomes, but also to improve profitability of the healthcare enterprise. Just think of what artificial intelligence can do for radiology today. AI can reduce workload, but it can also detect lesions that are sometimes hard to find for the human eye. Instead of studying a chest image for forty minutes, it can now be done in less than five. So, it’s a mix: digitization improves patient outcomes, but it also increases productivity.
Middle East Health: How is Barco contributing to the digitization of healthcare enterprises?
Ahmed Alkhatib: Barco has been developing medical display solutions for more than 20 years and has always been a frontrunner in improving medical workflows for radiologists. Today, Barco’s offering is much wider, stretching into the digital operating room, digital pathology, and even healthcare operations centres.
Middle East Health: How does digitization help the operating room?
Ahmed Alkhatib: More and more imaging technology is brought into the OR today. While this is a good thing, it has also made the setup and configuration before surgery complex and time-consuming. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult to prevent surgery delays, cancellations and long patient waiting lists.
With a technology called OR-over-IP, you make the IP network the universal communications platform, allowing OR technicians to share uncompressed, high-resolution video in and between operating rooms. This is exactly what Barco’s Nexxis OR-over-IP platform does. With Nexxis, you can add new devices or switch sources on a plug and play basis, and display images on any OR display connected through the network.
Again, digitization benefits everyone. Surgeons can use the Nexxis system to view images with near-zero latency and thus improve their hand-eye coordination. In turn, this allows the OR to treat more patients, which increases revenue.
With a solution like NexxisLive, you can even share surgical images with remote professionals, who are joining the case to provide assistance, or with students who can follow the procedure in an external auditorium.
Middle East Health: Barco has also entered the field of digital pathology. How would you describe this niche?
Ahmed Alkhatib: Digital pathology is an emerging technology in pathology, in which a scanner converts glass tissue slides into digital slides that can be viewed and analyzed on a display with the help of viewing software. In contrast to the often-time-consuming analog method of looking at slides under the microscope, digital pathology makes it possible to view slides much faster and diagnose more efficiently. Biopsy or sample collection techniques, laboratory workflow and final reporting with treatment decisions remain largely unchanged, but the slide review phase of the pathology process can now be done in a digital way, in combination with or even replacing a microscope.
Middle East Health: What innovations in pathology can we expect from Barco?
Ahmed Alkhatib : Barco has contributed to digital pathology innovation by the recent launch of the MDPC-8127, the first ever medical-grade display designed exclusively for digital pathology. With regulatory clearances for use in digital pathology, including primary diagnosis, it’s the first display that you can confidently integrate into your digital pathology workflow with multiple whole slide imaging systems.
The MDPC-8127 is an 8-megapixel, display that offers high pixel density and color per-pixel-uniformity, so slide images are displayed extremely sharp and consistent. The display’s color gamut is also tailored for digital pathology images, and offers up to 1.07 billion possible colors. This brings an unprecedented visual richness to digital pathology.
You can say that digitization really makes a huge difference for pathology imaging. To efficiently view slides, you need great detail and high zooming capability. And this is exactly what Barco’s MDPC-8127 display offers. It provides pathologists with optimal viewing confidence and improved workflow efficiency.
We are looking forward to showcasing this display at Arab Health in January 2022.
Middle East Health: Barco is now also helping healthcare facilities to streamline operations. How are they doing this?
Ahmed Alkhatib: Barco has many years of experience with visualization and collaboration solutions for command centres. Just think of the large video wall screens and operator consoles you know from a traffic or utility centre. The value Barco offers there is to bring information and data from different sources, stakeholders and departments together in a clear and efficient overview. Today, we see an increased need to do just that, with the rise of the healthcare operations centre.
Nowadays, hospitals are complex organizations that communicate and collaborate across multiple health systems, sites and departments. If you want to guarantee high-quality patient care and coordinate these operations efficiently, you need to have a clear overview of your patient flows and capacity. This way, you can better allocate resources and reduce waiting times for patients. A healthcare operations centre acts as the nerve centre of a hospital, and brings all that information data and information together, so hospital personnel can make the right decisions to optimize their patient flow, monitor bed capacity and manage OR occupancy for example.
During the Covid pandemic, authorities and healthcare facilities needed to have an efficient overview of their bed capacities. Thanks to these healthcare operations centres, different clusters of healthcare facilities could easily communicate and align their operations with each other. But even beyond the pandemic, decision-makers are realizing the benefit of having such a real-time operational overview to take decisions that have an impact nation-wide.
Middle East Health: This is what is already happening today. How do you see digitization developing within five to ten years?
Ahmed Alkhatib : The trends mentioned above will remain in effect for years to come, but you can also expect AI, robotic surgery and interactive patient care to become more important. At Barco, we are continuously monitoring market trends and anticipating future trends, so we can meet the increasingly high expectations of medical professionals and patients.
