“Extremely digital, supported by artificial intelligence, without predefined departments and welcoming, with lots of greenery and a strong sustainability footprint. The hospital of the future will have to be flexible, modular also because Covid-19 has taught us that a rapid reconfiguration of beds may be necessary”. This was said by Giovanni Guizzetti, clinical engineer of the Italian Association of Clinical Engineers and socio-health director of Asst Ovest Milanese, coordinating the session dedicated to the topic during the AIIC national conference underway in Rome until 18 May at the La Nuvola Congress Center.
“To understand what the future of care centers could be – continues Guizzetti – we must understand what the future of all citizen healthcare will be and, therefore, also how a new relationship between home healthcare and territorial healthcare will be established. In this sense, the belief that emerged from the interventions of all the experts involved by AIIC is also shared at an international level: the chronic patient will almost never have to access the hospital of the future, except in very rare cases and in decidedly different living conditions that in the past”. Furthermore, among the most important innovations that are outlined, the tendency to think stands out, Guizzetti underlines, “that there will not be a differentiation between one department and another, but that the structuring of spaces and paths will be designed based on the intensity of care. All with particular attention to contact with nature, and with greater presence of green areas because this, as has been widely demonstrated, also contributes to the greater well-being of the patient”.
“The future of our hospitals starts from each of us who expect to be taken care of, even before being treated – adds Paolo Petralia, deputy vice-president of Fiaso and general director of ASL 4 Liguria, describing the evolution of hospital care – The hospitals they have not always been just places of desirable healing, of treating illnesses, but they were born as places of welcome, of hospitality for travelers and pilgrims. With the advancement of technology and science, they must become paths, spaces, perspectives for taking charge and care and in this an important role is played by digitalisation and artificial intelligence”. It is therefore a question of developing “a model of a hospital that communicates with the territory – continues Petralia – and of a territory that moves towards the hospital in a logic of circularity and not exclusivity”.
In the hospital of the future, “there will be many single rooms”, at least half of the beds, “not only for greater patient comfort – Guizzetti specifies – but also because this allows us to better control hospital infections. And above all it will be a totally digitalized hospital in which artificial intelligence applications will support the entire diagnosis and treatment process.” Vision confirmed by Petralia, who declares that in treatment centers “you will not have to share a room with other people and, thanks to technology, the virtualisation of beds will be achieved thanks to which it will no longer be necessary to have to sleep in hospital to be treated” because, with data sharing, “assistance will be provided when needed, at home”. At a technological level, “artificial intelligence will be able to support and support operators, but also patients in the experience of staying in hospital to obtain answers that are advanced from the point of view of clinical content, but also sustainable and pleasant from the point of view the way in which they are provided”.
In the session of the AIIC Conference, the dialogue also explored the area of planning in which a total “absence” of beds is expected, because the hospital becomes the “concentrator of home healthcare”, a hub of patients who are monitored at home and managed centrally by a structure in which multidisciplinary professionals assist the patient who is, however, at home. But perhaps this is still science fiction or not? “The transformation of this approach into reality is already underway – warns Guizzetti – we are not realizing it, but there are already examples in the world. In Italy today we have many, too many small hospitals, which cost a lot of money to manage and not allow the most advanced hospitals to be adequately supported. Of course, there remains the need to have the hospital close to the patient, but if we consider technological evolution and also the increase in self-driving transport, it is easy to understand. that the prospect of a hospital without beds is not so science fiction.”
The final perspective that emerged during the AIIC event on the hospital of the future is summarized as follows by Paolo Petralia: “Faced with an often obsolete hospital building heritage, we can imagine, over time, being able to work to transform the current buildings into adequate buildings in terms of structures that save energy, that are green, automated and efficient both from the point of view of routes and also of travel, in a logic that, from the monobloc, returns to designing small pavilions, surrounded by greenery and capable of being flexible in their use, as the pandemic has taught us”.
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