From China’s Smart Hospital Technology to Europe’s Secure Healthcare Data Infrastructure, Huawei is Driving Digital Transformation across the Global Healthcare Industry.
By harnessing digital technologies, modern healthcare organizations are being provided with the opportunities to improve patient care, increase operational efficiency, and reduce costs. However, delivering improved healthcare services to patients while safeguarding sensitive information and infrastructure demands the right mix of expertise, technology, and implementation.
As a leading global provider of ICT infrastructure and smart devices, Huawei is committed to providing comprehensive and efficient ICT solutions and services for industry customers through open cooperation with partners, supporting intelligent upgrade, optimizing healthcare service levels and public health management, and addressing imbalance in healthcare resources. Globally, Huawei has served more than 5000 healthcare institutions in over 90 countries.
Challenges at the heart of healthcare digitalization
Realizing the full transformative potential of digitalization means the healthcare industry faces some significant challenges particularly when it comes to managing the ever-growing volume of data, delivering efficient connectivity among devices, and address escalating cybersecurity threats.
Data Management
Reports from IDC indicate that 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 of data is overwhelming existing storage systems, necessitating the development of more robust data management strategies.
In Europe, Huawei is supporting core service systems of hospitals to run efficiently and stably via its all-flash storage which ensures healthcare data security throughout the lifecycle. Huawei’s high-quality 10GE hospital network helps elderly care service providers deliver green, continuous, and stable high-quality network services to their customers, meaning that data can be accessed with maximum efficiency.
Connectivity
At the connectivity level, the healthcare industry is grappling with the need to interconnect a vast array of devices to enhance healthcare service quality. In China, for instance, there were 37,000 hospitals with a total of 9.75 million beds in 2022. Assuming each bed requires six information points, this results in over 60 million connections among healthcare devices. Managing such a massive network of connections presents substantial challenges in terms of efficiency and the quality of connectivity, which is critical for delivering high-quality healthcare services.
In China, Huawei has worked with over 60% of healthcare institutions, fully supporting 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.
Cybersecurity
According to a report by Check Point “Cyber-Attacks Trends: 2022 Mid-Year“, during the first half of 2022, the healthcare sector witnessed a 69% increase in cyberattacks, surpassing any other industry. These threats pose a significant risk to patient data, hospital operations, and overall patient safety, demanding heightened cybersecurity measures and preparedness. This means that, globally providers are searching for technology providers who can deliver the secure infrastructure and technology solutions necessary to realise their digital transformation roadmaps.
Hospital-wide Data Convergence and Efficiency
Where access to data and effective information management are imperative, Huawei’s solutions are helping to reshape the way healthcare institutions operate.
Huawei Smart Ward Solution
Many healthcare providers are seeking to provide a smart hospital ward experience; however, these ambitions are often hindered by high network latency which impedes healthcare efficiency and undermines the patient experience. These challenges are necessitating a shift to a more responsive and real-time data access infrastructure.
Based on Wi-Fi and IoT, Huawei’s smart ward solution supports real-time and smooth transmission of data, HD images, and video from medical equipment, achieving zero roaming and no disconnection for mobile terminals to improve the efficiency of ward rounds.
Healthcare providers benefit from improved operational efficiency and service experience, through the implementation of IoT applications such as asset management, baby monitoring, infusion monitoring, vital sign monitoring, and personnel positioning, resulting in a reduction in nursing workloads by 20%.
Relying on Huawei’s experience and established infrastructure means that partner organizations benefit from reduced network construction and O&M costs, resulting in a 60% reduction in the total cost of ownership.
The concept of mobile care is also significantly advanced with a smart ward solution. It introduces zero-roaming distributed Wi-Fi with wide coverage, allowing one access point to serve multiple rooms, thus eliminating issues related to network roaming and ensuring high bandwidth. This technology can provide up to 300 Mbit/s for a single user and a remarkable 1.8 Gbit/s for the entire network, accommodating the growing demand for data-intensive healthcare tasks.
Moreover, Huawei’s solution incorporates hyper-convergence, combining intranet, extranet, and IoT networks into one device, simplifying network management and optimizing healthcare connectivity.
Huawei Digital Medical Technology Solution
Slow access to medical images can severely hinder efficient diagnosis and collaboration between multidisciplinary teams. Furthermore, the massive volume of data generated by modern imaging operations incurs high storage costs. Storing this data necessitates high-performance storage solutions to maintain accessibility and integrity.
Huawei’s Digital Medical Technology Solution builds a unified architecture based on cloud computing and big data. With over 1000 images and pathology slices can be viewed in seconds, saving 30% of storage space and 70% of equipment room space. It not only helps benefit medical imaging services in hospitals around the world, but also delivers accurate, efficient, and consistent image reading and diagnosis services.
Huawei’s digital medical technology solution delivers hospital-wide data convergence that leads to significant healthcare operational improvements. 10 Gbit/s of symmetrical bandwidth supports the upload of 2000 images in seconds, meaning hospitals can benefit from an 80-fold improvement in image query performance, and the image reading efficiency of the PACS is quadrupled.
Providers experience streamlined data accessibility & storage through Huawei’s lossless compression algorithm and SmartCache 2.0 augments small file read performance by 30% or more. Images are intelligently stored in advance, allowing clinicians to access them without delays, thus improving patient care.
In addition, the integration of video-network linkage provides seamless collaboration opportunities for enhancing remote consultations and teaching.
Huawei Smart Hospital Campus Solution
Currently, smart hospital campus construction is developing rapidly, but several challenges lie in the transition from traditional hospital campuses to smart ones. For example, service data cannot be viewed in real time, cross-campus collaboration is difficult, and experience is inconsistent across campuses.
The Huawei Smart Hospital Campus Solution is based on the digital platform foundation. It adopts the “1+9+1” architecture (1 HOC, 9 application scenarios, and 1 digital platform), and builds secure, intelligent, green, and efficient smart hospital campuses at four layers (intelligent PU, intelligent connectivity, intelligent hub, and intelligent application), supporting smart operations and management.
The digital platform serves as the foundation of the smart hospital campus solution, amalgamating fundamental ICT capabilities encompassing big data, video cloud, IoT, and GIS.
Its openness allows seamless integration with diverse healthcare information systems, culminating in an open platform conducive to accumulating business assets, data assets, and integration assets that support scenario-based applications in smart hospital campuses.
Institutions deploying Huawei’s smart hospital campus solution gain multiple advantages, including streamlined digital operations with a comprehensive hospital operation center (HOC) that displays essential data for informed decision-making and efficient emergency response.
It also promotes refined and cost-effective management by reducing security and device maintenance expenses, while optimizing energy consumption and improving healthcare asset utilization, patient satisfaction, and staff contentment.
Moreover, the system ensures a consistent healthcare service experience by unifying operations management and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across various hospital campuses, fostering standardized and high-quality care delivery.
Huawei’s Benchmark Cases in Global Intelligent Healthcare
Huawei’s cutting-edge technologies are ushering in a new era of healthcare solutions which are redefining industry’s standards. These innovations are helping to revolutionize healthcare operations, optimize bandwidth, reduce costs, enhance security, and deliver unparalleled service.
Regional Medical Imaging Platform of Longgang District Health Bureau
The Longgang District Health Bureau, a department under Shenzhen Longgang District People’s Government, adopted the Huawei Medical Technology Digital Solution for the delivery of a connected regional medical imaging platform.
Using the platform, 12 hospitals in Longgang District can interconnect with each other and share medical image data, retrieve image reports in one click, and achieve mutual recognition of cross-hospital examinations. This ensures that data is fully utilized to serve patients more efficiently, improves the regional allocation of imaging resources, promotes downward deployment of high-quality healthcare resources, and creates a new pattern of hierarchical diagnosis and treatment.
Thanks to the platform, doctors can improve the speed and convenience of diagnoses while hospitals save on reports and film consumables (In Longgang District, about CNY16.56 million can be saved by replacing conventional physical films).
West China Hospital, Sichuan University — hWGS Results Analyzed Within Minutes, Accelerating Exploration of Life with Intelligent Technology
The era of gene big data has arrived, and countries around the world have gradually begun gene sequencing research programs for population-based cohorts. West China Hospital began a whole genome sequencing (WGS) project for 100,000 Chinese patients with rare diseases in 2020. The high-performance genome analysis platform is indispensable in large-scale whole-genome analysis.
West China Hospital teamed up with Huawei and Sailegene to release a multi-omics data acceleration analysis platform. Huawei OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage improves the storage performance by 200 times, shortening the WGS period from 24 hours to seven minutes. This is the first time that the human WGS (hWGS) process is finished within minutes, which is of trans-epoch significance in the field of multi-omics data analysis.
Wuhan Union Hospital: High-Quality SDN Helps Implement Integrated Service Management for Multiple Hospital Campuses
The newly built Jinyinhu Campus and Proton Medical Center at Wuhan Union Hospital uses the Huawei iMaster NCE-Campus as the SDN brain of the hospital.
The Proton Medical Center connects to the Jinyinhu campus network through a dedicated line and uses the iMaster-NCE controller of the Jinyinhu Campus to automatically deploy services. Based on a unified SDN management platform, Wuhan Union Hospital implements unified management and control, one network for multiple purposes, multiple-network isolation, and automatic service deployment across various campuses, achieving more intelligent network management and more efficient network O&M.
Huawei All-Flash Storage Helps Accelerate the Digital Healthcare System of University Hospital Essen
University Hospital Essen, the largest hospital in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, has 1770 beds and 8500 employees. It treats 50,000 inpatients and 195,000 outpatients annually.
Due to the continuous business growth and increasing patient data from RIS, HIS, EMR, and PACS, the existing IT system was slow and unable to handle the necessary volume of requests and interactions. The hospital has adopted Huawei All-Flash Storage Solution OceanStor Dorado V6, which realizes over 300,000 IOPS and with only 0.3 ms latency. It reduced at least 30% CAPEX and up to 50% in total cost of ownership.
Huawei’s fully connected and reliable healthcare solutions provide medical professionals and organizations with the collaborative infrastructure they need to securely share, process, and use healthcare data to effectively care for their patients. To learn more, visit https://e.huawei.com/en/industries/healthcare
