On that subject of burnout, how is Philips making sure its products aren’t inundating doctors with irrelevant data?

JAKOBS: We got very early-on experience in terms of the power of data, and how it can release some of the burden on the system with our acute care telehealth solutions, because we have a major stronghold in ICU with our monitors. So early on, we were working on how we can translate the data in a meaningful manner to the nurse, the doctor, the administrator — all the different audiences you serve in the hospital — and to actually relieve them from the burden of dealing with all the patient data.

How can you make it more easy to work with the data? How can you give access across care settings? And how can you do it in a virtual manner? So early on we worked on, what’s the efficiency increase you can give, for example, to a nurse so they can instead of taking care of one to three patients, take care of seven to 10. That gives a much wider span to the system and its nurses, because they get the relevant info and right alarming at the right time, so they don’t have to go in for routine checks constantly. You can give them a signal to intervene instead. That takes burden away.

So we got a lot of those learnings in acute care telehealth, and then extended those to patient flow and resource management across the system. If you start looking at a patient before they get to the hospital — well, what hospital should you send them to? If one is overburdened, you need to send them to another. You can do that upfront before they’re at your doorstep.

That monitoring of the patient, determining where they can best be treated given capacity and capability, is something you can enable with some of the solutions we have. And that relieves burden.

Because honestly, one of our insights during COVID was that technology is not the limiting factor. The humans are. The people are the scarce resource. They either are in such high demand that there are not enough of them, or they’re burning out given the high demand on them. So how can we release them? How can we create more space, more efficiencies? How can we expand the scope of work they can do?

And how can we actually help the system to deploy them in the best and most meaningful manner? And then, for a nurse or doctor, work becomes more meaningful because they feel more rewarded in what they do. Because they are going where they’re most needed.

Prior to taking over connected care, you ran personal health for Philips. What’s your take on rising consumer agency in managing their own health? And what do you think about this increasing decentralization of care delivery?

JAKOBS: To me it’s both a necessity and a huge opportunity to spread care across really different care settings, and taking more charge of the ambulatory care settings at your disposal.

When that’s technology-enabled, it’s much more feasible, but also we get more data on the status of the patient and their therapy and — especially when you look at chronic care — providing it in a more meaningful manner.

So it’s both an efficiency and effectiveness game. And I think that we are just starting to look at the potential of that.

It will require a change of practice. And there’s a lot of room where we can do much more. But going back to what we saw in COVID-19, some of this was really propelled and I think will continue to gain adoption, especially if we work together better in the health ecosystem, and allow others to play with the data we have.

That’s why we’ve been strongly advocating vendor neutrality, interoperability and getting to common standards. We have HealthSuite where we can derive our own insights from what is also being deployed to marketplaces and others, that can access that data for them.

That for me is the future of care, where in a secure and trusted manner, you can allow access to the right parties, and that will allow different delivery of care. And that change of delivery of care structurally over the long run is needed to deal with the capacity constraints of the system as is, where still the majority is hospital-based, and going into the most expensive care setting, which is ICU.

And that’s a practice that we need to break. And we can break currently with new insights and new technologies.