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Healthcare Digitisation Involves The Delivery Of Facilities As Well As Services

Digitisation is widely seen as essential for modernising healthcare delivery and addressing aspects of health inequality. At its heart, it’s about improving access to services, using data to promote preventative healthcare and making the best use of resources.

Digital healthcare is often thought of in terms of virtual consultations, AI, data sharing between healthcare professionals, and devices that can monitor health indicators remotely. But there are also important benefits when it comes to planning and delivering new healthcare facilities.

There is a link, for example, between access to transport and health and wellbeing. That’s one reason behind the strategy to deliver more specialist treatments through community-based facilities. Data will inform planners and commissioners about what services need to be provided and where. This intelligence will also help reshape the role and function of general hospitals.

Designing services that address inequality and other issues will increasingly rely on geospatial information systems. These systems process health and demographic data to show where new facilities would have the greatest impact.

When we have all of that information, what do we do with it? The process for creating new healthcare facilities needs to be just as adaptable and digitally-driven as the planning.

The Importance of Place

The best location for a new facility from the perspective of improved health outcomes is unlikely to be the easiest site to build on. That shouldn’t be a constraint. The priority should be to find inventive ways to build what is needed, where it is needed.

Modern digitally-enabled construction methods are less restricted by sites that are tight or hard to access. They are also much more suitable for building in live environments. The streamlined design and build process gives designers more freedom to be innovative while having the confidence that designs can be recreated in practice and will perform as specified.

As we start to realise a new vision for healthcare services, finding partners that are experienced in using modern methods to create high-performing facilities will be essential. Osborne has significant experience in this area.

Visit our resource centre to find out more about our approach and the issues that are reshaping healthcare construction.

HEALTHCARE CONSTRUCTION RESOURCE CENTRE

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