The healthtech revolution: AI and healthcare construction in a post-COVID world
David Harper, co-founder & CEO of ATLAS, explains the role that artificial intelligence could have in a post-COVID world.
After decades of low digitisation, an ever-increasing universe of technologies are disrupting the way we plan, design, and execute healthcare projects.
Our London-based start-up, ATLAS Group London (ATLAS), is developing a technology platform (ICAS) which provides a digital solution for designing & delivering sustainable, cost-effective, and scalable healthcare facilities.
The Oracle-backed platform is an elegant solution that interconnects the design, procurement and delivery process for healthcare facilities resulting in a complete, fully engineered, Digital Twin of the facility to be built. This addresses many of the time and cost inefficiencies present in traditional construction saving both time and money in the process – ultimately helping to improve access to healthcare services around the world.
Our vision is to be the technology platform for healthcare construction. There is a growing backlog for adequate healthcare services around the world, and healthcare stakeholders today simply don’t have the time to wait several years for a hospital to be designed and built.
Using AI, parametric design, and bespoke digital twin technologies ATLAS’ ICAS Platform allows for a real-time mapping of all components in the life-cycle of a customer’s healthcare facility using physical, virtual and interaction data processes across people, places, systems and devices.
ICAS applies AI across multiple disciplines and data environments. With ever better techniques for gathering and aggregating data, such as demographic illness trends and outcomes, ICAS helps inform optimum designs for healthcare facilities based on community-focused care models, surgery/recovery times, and palliative care trends.
Getting it right at the design stage and ensuring errors are not “built into” the hospital, is critical for the success of a healthcare construction project. Our AI driven data analysis allows us to codify the relevant healthcare standards into best fit algorithms and parametric design-generating engines - this allows us to design code compliant facilities quickly and efficiently.
Using AI “crawlers” for identifying and correcting errors, ICAS analyses each data field in the relevant specification documents to ensure compliance with healthcare standards, supporting best practice clinical workflows.
The ICAS platform also uses AI in the configuration of critical hospital systems. This allows the platform to carry out complex systems integration quickly and more efficiently, and before long-lead medical devices/items arrive on site - ultimately speeding up the commissioning and activation of healthcare facilities by up to 40% allowing healthcare stakeholders to rapidly scale their healthcare infrastructure.
Its fully configured smart IT operating system can also link multiple healthcare facilities together providing far reaching digital health networks. This is especially crucial in more remote communities. By helping to maximise digital adoption of the latest telehealth technologies, this makes it easier to access remote diagnosis and monitoring – ultimately leading to better patient outcomes.
We are implementing a digital twin philosophy for healthcare construction. Our platform provides detailed digital twin models which customers can build to, in half the time and cost of traditional construction. But it also provides healthcare operators with all the information and data they need to operate their facilities more efficiently – from cutting down waste and using energy effectively to work-flow modelling.
We use generative design leveraging agile sorting algorithms, which allows customers to easily and quickly design their fully engineered facilities & cost/plan the construction of their healthcare projects.
Procurement has always been a bottleneck for construction. So we use API’s and real time data links allowing customers to “on board” their preferred suppliers & manufacturers, creating a fully integrated supply chain.
Overcoming the traditional “silo” culture between architects, designers, health planners and builders, by providing a single platform for the exchange of data and information, is the key to success for ATLAS’ platform. ICAS not only increases efficiency and visibility, it crucially involves the operator earlier, and to a much greater degree, across the entire process.
If there is one thing that COVID has demonstrated to us, it’s how much we rely on robust healthcare infrastructure in our communities. By providing a viable, cost-effective, and scalable solution to healthcare stakeholders, we help improve quality healthcare access around the world and fight deadly diseases.
Read more about ATLAS here.
Read more about ORACLE here.