Singapore's ST Engineering and Royal Philips have formed a strategic partnership to offer complementary digital health solutions for bedside support and capacity management.

The solutions include ST Engineering’s operations command centre, robotics and AI-enabled applications, and Philips’ clinical command centre, to drive empirical outcomes and enhance the digital transformation efforts of healthcare providers in Asia Pacific (APAC), starting with Singapore.

The partnership, inked at ST Engineering’s annual InnoTech Conference, combines Philips’ global leadership in remote health technology with ST Engineering’s extensive digital tech capabilities.

The joint objective aims to bridge health systems gaps in actionable data utilisation while leveraging real-time insights to optimise care access and patient flow, a key area that healthcare systems in APAC are moving into to improve patient care impacted by workforce shortages and growing demand.

Key collaborative efforts between ST Engineering and Philips are as follows: 

• ST Engineering’s AGIL® Care next-generation operations command centre and Philips’ clinical command centre synergises insights from operational and clinical data on the respective systems. They effectively form a holistic command centre with full situational awareness of the entire patient journey via an interoperable remote service model. Leveraging machine learning and advanced analytics, hospital systems driving similar remote services can expect to reduce length of stay by more than 20%.

• Philips’ application which captures streaming clinical data from more than 1,000 bedside devices, is compatible with ST Engineering’s AI-driven AGIL® Assistive IoT Platform which consolidates IoT assets within the hospital into a single platform. This has the potential to bring together data on patient status, enabling healthcare providers to extend care delivery services beyond hospital operations.

In Philips’ Future Health Index 2024 survey of 600 healthcare leaders in APAC, 93% in APAC and 84% in Singapore reported that they experienced data integration challenges in their organisation. Improved data accuracy, data security and privacy, and interoperability between platforms and healthcare settings were identified as ways to change how data is being handled to provide timely and high quality care.

(From left) Teo Ming Kian, Chairman, ST Engineering; Tan Bin Ru, President, Enterprise Digital, ST Engineering; Ong Ye Kung, Singapore’s Minister for Health; Dan Ball, Head of Enterprise Informatics, Philips Asia Pacific; and Fabia Tetteroo-Bueno, Global Commercial Leader Enterprise Informatics, Philips.