With the explosion of digital technologies and transformations being seen across the globe, enterprises, individuals and industries are racing to find ways to implement it across their operations.
Healthcare, often overburdened and understaffed, is one area digitalisation can stand to benefit. Offering significant improvements in efficiency, accuracy, and patient outcomes, such technologies can enhance speed and accuracy of hospital operations.
Yet, the digitalisation of healthcare presents significant challenges. Data security and storage, old legacy systems and slow networks are challenges that stop providers being able to provide a healthcare fit for the future.
The healthcare sector’s data volume is growing at a staggering rate of 48% annually, with numerous large hospitals accumulating data to the petabyte level. This influx is overwhelming existing storage systems, necessitating the development of more robust data management strategies.
Connectivity poses another significant hurdle. In China alone, there were 37,000 hospitals with 9.75 million beds in 2022, potentially requiring over 60 million connections among healthcare devices. Managing this vast network of connections efficiently is crucial for delivering high-quality healthcare services, yet requires a robust network capable of doing so.
Luckily, Huawei has made healthcare one of its focuses. With its vast experience in both networks and storage, alongside its work on cloud computing, big data, and new announcements on AI, they are able to bring in the infrastructure for partners to manage and enhance their operations.
The prescription for enhancing healthcare
As an ICT provider, Huawei builds a secure digital foundation for the healthcare industry partners to build their digital solutions on top of, tailored to their needs. Due to their strengths in this, Huawei has worked with over 60% of healthcare institutions in China as the preferred partner to fully support the construction of smart hospitals, smart health units, and smart medical insurance to help the healthcare industry manage the challenges of connectivity, operate safely, and improve quality.
One such solution available to healthcare providers is the Huawei Digital Medical Technology Solution, which builds a unified architecture based on cloud computing, big data, and AI that benefits medical imaging services in hospitals around the world.
It has five major features, namely hospital-wide data convergence, multi-protocol and copy-free, lossless compression, SmartCache 2.0 AI prefetch, and video-network collaboration.
These capabilities have enabled applications such as enabling 1000 images and pathology slices to be viewed in seconds, dramatically reducing the time required for diagnosis and enabling medical professionals to make faster, more informed decisions.
This platform solution has been successfully implemented in the regional medical imaging platform project of the Longgang District Health Bureau, Shenzhen, giving them interconnection to share medical image data, one-click access to imaging reports, and benefit from mutual recognition of examination results across hospitals.
At Huawei Connect 2024 Shanghai, the tech leader in fact announced an update to the solution, the Digital Medical Technology Solution 2.0. This solution implements AI-assisted diagnosis and intelligent quality control, facilitating precision healthcare as well as hierarchical diagnosis and treatment.
Incorporating AI, computing, storage, and network, Huawei’s Medical Technology Digitalization 2.0 Solution allows partners to build applications to implement AI-based quality control and diagnosis, significantly improving the quality and efficiency of healthcare services.
In medical imaging, this solution can intelligently identify and score the quality of images. The accuracy of AI quality control reaches 98%, boosting image quality, shortening diagnosis time by 40%.
Medical image data accounts for 80% of clinical data. Therefore, a Huawei-developed compression algorithm means such imagery now saves 30% in storage and in turn 70% of equipment room space, allowing hospitals to optimise their physical infrastructure, freeing up valuable areas for patient care or additional medical services. This is particularly crucial as healthcare facilities struggle with space constraints and the need to accommodate ever-growing patient populations.
Much of this can be done in a single second, with uninterrupted data sharing and zero read latency. That is thanks to its Huawei’s Smart Ward Solution, which takes Wi-Fi, IoT, and multi-band convergence in one network to support data collection for more than 400 terminals.
link