How Huawei's Digital Solutions are Transforming Healthcare
With the explosion of digital technologies and transformations being seen across the globe, enterprises, individuals and industries are racing to find ways to implement it across their operations.
Healthcare, often overburdened and understaffed, is one area digitalisation can stand to benefit. Offering significant improvements in efficiency, accuracy, and patient outcomes, such technologies can enhance speed and accuracy of hospital operations.
Yet, the digitalisation of healthcare presents significant challenges. Data security and storage, old legacy systems and slow networks are challenges that stop providers being able to provide a healthcare fit for the future.
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 is overwhelming existing storage systems, necessitating the development of more robust data management strategies.
Connectivity poses another significant hurdle. In China alone, there were 37,000 hospitals with 9.75 million beds in 2022, potentially requiring over 60 million connections among healthcare devices. Managing this vast network of connections efficiently is crucial for delivering high-quality healthcare services, yet requires a robust network capable of doing so.
Luckily, Huawei has made healthcare one of its focuses. With its vast experience in both networks and storage, alongside its work on cloud computing, big data, and new announcements on AI, they are able to bring in the infrastructure for partners to manage and enhance their operations.
The prescription for enhancing healthcare
As an ICT provider, Huawei builds a secure digital foundation for the healthcare industry partners to build their digital solutions on top of, tailored to their needs. Due to their strengths in this, Huawei has worked with over 60% of healthcare institutions in China as the preferred partner to fully support 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.
One such solution available to healthcare providers is the Huawei Digital Medical Technology Solution, which builds a unified architecture based on cloud computing, big data, and AI that benefits medical imaging services in hospitals around the world.
It has five major features, namely hospital-wide data convergence, multi-protocol and copy-free, lossless compression, SmartCache 2.0 AI prefetch, and video-network collaboration.
These capabilities have enabled applications such as enabling 1000 images and pathology slices to be viewed in seconds, dramatically reducing the time required for diagnosis and enabling medical professionals to make faster, more informed decisions.
This platform solution has been successfully implemented in the regional medical imaging platform project of the Longgang District Health Bureau, Shenzhen, giving them interconnection to share medical image data, one-click access to imaging reports, and benefit from mutual recognition of examination results across hospitals.
At Huawei Connect 2024 Shanghai, the tech leader in fact announced an update to the solution, the Digital Medical Technology Solution 2.0. This solution implements AI-assisted diagnosis and intelligent quality control, facilitating precision healthcare as well as hierarchical diagnosis and treatment.
Incorporating AI, computing, storage, and network, Huawei's Medical Technology Digitalization 2.0 Solution allows partners to build applications to implement AI-based quality control and diagnosis, significantly improving the quality and efficiency of healthcare services.
In medical imaging, this solution can intelligently identify and score the quality of images. The accuracy of AI quality control reaches 98%, boosting image quality, shortening diagnosis time by 40%.
Medical image data accounts for 80% of clinical data. Therefore, a Huawei-developed compression algorithm means such imagery now saves 30% in storage and in turn 70% of equipment room space, allowing hospitals to optimise their physical infrastructure, freeing up valuable areas for patient care or additional medical services. This is particularly crucial as healthcare facilities struggle with space constraints and the need to accommodate ever-growing patient populations.
Much of this can be done in a single second, with uninterrupted data sharing and zero read latency. That is thanks to its Huawei's Smart Ward Solution, which takes Wi-Fi, IoT, and multi-band convergence in one network to support data collection for more than 400 terminals.
This also allows a video-network synergy stable enough to support consistent remote diagnosis and promote telemetry or AI diagnosis. Introducing the concept of mobile care, with zero-roaming distributed Wi-Fi offering wide coverage, this frees up nursing staff to make more targeted viewings and saves time spent doing general rounds of wards.
Leveraging its strong cloud capabilities, Huawei is able to provide a space for the cloud-network-edge-device synergy for seamless transfer of information. The One Hospital, Multiple Branches Solution builds an integrated cloud-network-edge resource base to implement unified management as well as diagnosis and treatment services of the same quality across different hospital branches.
The Smart Hospital Campus Solution 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 centre (HOC) that displays essential data for informed decision-making and efficient emergency response.
First digital, now intelligent healthcare
Beyond infrastructure, Huawei is working with long-time partner AI firm IFLYTEK to develop AI solutions for a more intelligent healthcare system.
With its own LLMs trained completely on a home-grown computing platform, and co-developed with and announced at Huawei Connect 2024, the pair have been able to utilise the new storage, computing and library of AI assets from the Ascend range to build 53 built-in AI agent services for patients, doctors, and administrators.
Partnering with West China hospital, Huawei's computing cluster has made it possible to use the solution on 6000 patients daily.
These AI solutions have multiple applications across the healthcare sector, from helping patients get better diagnoses of their symptoms and guiding them to the appropriate department, to augmenting doctors' discharge notes for better patient recovery support.
And In the realm of hospital management, AI is being leveraged to streamline administrative tasks. From managing medical records to conducting quality inspections and summarising complex medical data, these AI solutions are freeing up valuable time for healthcare professionals to focus on patient care. The technology is even being used to optimise patient flow, helping to reduce wait times and prevent scenarios where patients are left waiting in wheelie beds in hospital lobbies.
As Huawei continues to make progress in computing and storage clusters, the potential for AI applications in healthcare grows. The company's focus on data sensitivity, handling, and security makes its clusters particularly valuable for the healthcare sector. By using domestically made GPU clusters, Huawei ensures that healthcare providers have access to powerful computing resources while maintaining strict control over sensitive patient data.
It is for reasons like this that Huawei has served upwards of 5000 hospitals and research institutions in over 90 countries and regions, and has more than 3300 ecosystem partners.
These innovative solutions that it offers to healthcare, and more, can be witnessed at this year’s GITEX. From October 14 to 18, Huawei will be a Diamond Sponsor at the 44th GITEX GLOBAL 2024, one of the world's largest technology exhibitions.
With the theme of "Accelerate Industrial Digitalization and Intelligence", Huawei will launch a series of flagship products and solutions for the global enterprise markets, Reference Architecture for Intelligent Transformation, and rich innovative practices in digital intelligence in the global industry.
At the same time, Huawei will hold the Huawei Industrial Digital and Intelligent Transformation Summit 2024, dozens of forums, hundreds of talks and keynote speeches, exchanging thoughts with the industry.
At this exhibition, Huawei's booth is located at B10&B20, Hall 22, Dubai World Trade Center. It covers an area of more than 1400 square metres, with the focus on two themes: " Accelerate Industrial Digitalization and Intelligence" and "Leading Digital and Intelligent Infrastructure".
They are extending a welcome for all to visit the GITEX Global Huawei exhibition area to experience and join its journey of "Accelerate Industrial Digitalization and Intelligence".
******
Make sure you check out the latest industry news and insights at Healthcare Digital and also sign up to our global conference series - Tech & AI LIVE 2024
******
Healthcare Digital is a BizClik brand
