Stephanie Sievers, managing director for Philips APAC, giving the welcome address on Wednesday at the Philips APAC Innovation Summit in Singapore. (Courtesy of Philips Korea)
SINGAPORE -- By Kim Ji-hye/Korea Biomedical Review correspondent --
Hospitals in Asia need to rethink how they monitor patients as ageing populations and staff shortages put more pressure on doctors and nurses, Philips’ Asia-Pacific head has told Korea Biomedical Review.
Stephanie Sievers, Philips’ managing director for APAC, said the Dutch health technology company was moving away from selling individual hospital devices and toward software-based systems that help clinicians make sense of patient data.
“The evolution is from a product business to productivity,” she said in an interview with Korea Biomedical Review on Wednesday at the Philips APAC Innovation Summit in Singapore.
“That is what you achieve through software and through having platforms where the data is generated, interpreted and made sense of, so that clinicians can act on it more effectively.”
At the summit, Philips unveiled its patient monitoring strategy for Asia and demonstrated what it calls an Enterprise Command and Care Coordination Center, a system designed to connect patient monitors, hospital records and mobile alerts.
The system is meant to help hospitals sort through large amounts of patient data and flag the most urgent changes, instead of leaving doctors and nurses to respond to multiple devices producing separate alarms.
Philips is pitching the technology at a time when healthcare systems are under growing pressure.
The company cited a projected global shortage of more than 11 million health workers by 2030 and its own Future Health Index survey, which found that 76 percent of healthcare professionals reported losing clinical time because patient data was incomplete or difficult to access.
Sharad Jhingan, Head of Hospital and Ambulatory Monitoring, Philips APAC, unveiling a new patient monitoring strategy designed to help hospitals address workforce shortages and improve care coordination. (Credit: Korea Biomedical Review)
The problem is often described as alarm fatigue.
During a live demonstration, Sharad Jhingan, head of hospital and ambulatory monitoring at Philips APAC, said clinicians in intensive care units (ICUs) can become overwhelmed by constant alerts.
“You would silence them,” he said, comparing the experience to receiving repeated messages on a phone. “Even if it is something urgent... you would ignore it because it is causing too much stress.”
Philips says its newer monitoring systems are designed to reduce that burden by combining multiple patient signals, adjusting alerts to individual conditions and escalating warnings if no one responds.
Philips says its newer monitoring systems can reduce that problem by making alarms more targeted. Instead of alerting staff every time one number crosses a threshold, the system can combine several signals, personalise alarm settings to a patient’s condition and escalate alerts if the first clinician does not respond.
“What we don’t want to provide is noise,” said Mark Winden, Philips’ head of product management for hospital patient monitoring, during the media demonstration.
Why Singapore matters
The summit was held in Singapore, a market Philips sees as more advanced in connected hospital systems.
Sievers said Singapore’s healthcare system is more integrated than many others in the region, making it easier to connect data across hospitals and care networks.
“The specialty in Singapore is that...the clusters are very connected,” she said, referring to the country’s public hospital networks.
That differs from markets such as Korea, where Sievers said hospitals may have advanced equipment but tend to operate more independently, making wider system integration harder.
At Singapore General Hospital, clinicians say the problem is not a lack of data, but how that data is presented.
Dr. Luke Tay Hsien Ts’ung, Senior Consultant, Vascular Surgery, Singapore General Hospital, sharing the clinician's perspective. (Courtesy of Philips Korea)
In a fireside discussion at the summit, Dr. Luke Tay Hsien Ts’ung, a senior consultant vascular surgeon and clinical innovation lead at the hospital, said warning signs can be missed when clinicians are dealing with too many signals at once.
“You look through the records and think, my God, the numbers have been trending downwards over the last few hours,” he said. “How could anyone have let this happen?”
He said the issue is often not individual error, but the way information is structured. “There’s no one controller for information,” he added.
Ts’ung said better systems could reduce the “cognitive burden” on clinicians, particularly when they are managing multiple patients under time pressure.
But he also cautioned that AI tools need to be properly tested before hospitals can rely on them widely. “You must be able to trust that this particular model is being developed well enough,” he said.
Philips says its monitoring platform can be deployed in different countries, but Sievers said implementation depends on each hospital’s needs and digital infrastructure.
For countries such as Korea, where hospitals already use advanced equipment but often operate with separate systems, the challenge may be less about buying new technology than connecting what is already there.
Kim Ji-hye
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