More Power & Performance: Professional Workstations Give Healthcare Users the Technology They Need

The following is a guest article by Dan Stevens, a member of Lenovo’s Health Care strategy team.

Those of us of a certain age remember what computers used to be like.

We each had a big, pale white computer tower on our desks, whirring and grinding and spewing out warm air like an overpriced space heater. To access the computing power of these beasts, we clacked away on heavy keyboards and struggled with roller-ball mice, all connected to the CPU with a tangled mess of cords and wires.

Every brand of computer looked the same, armored in a pale white plastic that inevitably turned a nauseating shade of yellow-green over time. It even had a handy coffee cup tray that slid out when you opened the CD-ROM drive.

While it’s fun to reminisce about those machines, one can’t help but think how our personal devices have morphed over a relatively short period time. Silent, closed and disposable computing tools such as phones, tablets, laptops, and other innovative hybrid devices have replaced our long-forgotten beige computers.

But now, things seem to have come full circle. Today’s health care informatics environment of big data – and the accompanying intensive visualization required to interpret this data – demand higher performance and greater expandability.  Clearly, the ideal portfolio of computing resources requires more than what our disposable devices can offer.

Over the last decade, health care providers have transitioned their patient records, medical images and caregiver workflows into comprehensive electronic data environments. This is true for independent providers as well as those affiliated with large systems, independent hospitals, or physician groups.

For many, establishing this electronic health record (EHR) ecosystem has been a difficult journey. But these systems have matured into data-rich resources that can now be used to create actionable insights to improve patient quality of care, patient access, health care provider efficiency.

Real-World Value

Gaining this type of real-world value from the available data requires the computational and visualization capabilities of high-performance workstations. There are already many circumstances where high-performance workstations are being used to drive value to healthcare delivery for patients and providers:

AI-Aided Diagnosis

We are witnessing the maturation of Artificial Intelligence from speculative to pragmatic. Using real-time analyses of imaging, symptoms and historical data, physicians are using computer-assisted diagnosis to help determine the etiology of presented conditions.

PwC found that more than one-third of provider executives were investing in AI, machine learning and predictive analytics going into 2018. Medical imaging accounts for 90 percent of all medical data. With the emerging physician shortage problem, AI assisted diagnosis offers a path to managing physician burnout and patient access.

Complex Data Analysis

Data scientists are demanding more performance to crunch through data and offer interactive visualizations. Analytic processes that span across image analysis, diagnostic recommendations, and health condition prediction are already being used to improve patient care and experience.

Analytics are even being used to address administrative issues like predicting, seeking and finding billing fraud. Further, predicting utilization requirements are being used for optimizing allocation of resources in hospital environments.  To achieve these goals, AI has introduced a whole new sector of titles and careers paths to healthcare. They include informatics, data scientists, data and analytics officers, machine-learning engineers and data engineers.

Surgical Training and Enhancement

Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) are being used to assist in physician training. They can also augment surgical procedures by offering surgeons real-time guidance through AR visualizations.

Augmented Image Analyses

While the remote review of radiographs by radiologists is already commonly performed, real-time analysis of these images will enhance the precision of diagnoses.

Performance, Reliability, Expandability

Exploding healthcare data, combined with rising demand for healthcare services and skilled labor, has created a data-intensive environment requiring the necessity for high performance professional workstations.

When the goal is to leverage these data to maximize productivity, reduce the time to insights and lower the cost of your data science initiatives look for the solution that provides the maximum performance, reliability and expandability to meet your needs to quickly gain insights into improving patient outcomes.

Click here to learn more about Lenovo High-Performance Professional Workstations.

About Dan Stevens

Dan Stevens is a member of Lenovo’s Health Care strategy team with experience developing products for technology and care provider organization. Before joining Lenovo, he served as the Vice President of Strategic Development at Vidant Health and the Director of System Marketing Director at UNC Health Care. Before working within health care systems, Dan worked at Procter & Gamble, where he served as a Senior Scientist developing and launching products in the Oral Care category, and later as the Director of Life Science solutions at Silicon Graphics Inc. (SGI) where he oversaw the development of global high-performance computing solutions. Dan has advanced degrees in clinical medicine and basic science and serves on the Board of the North Carolina Chapter of the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

About Lenovo Health

Lenovo is a trusted provider of healthcare technology with a 20+ year history of world-class innovation, industry leading partnerships, and more than a decade of proven healthcare experience. Lenovo Health powers tailored care delivery in 160 countries and 1,600+ healthcare organizations worldwide.  Lenovo Health is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.

Lenovo Health’s vast computing portfolio supports the administrative, clinical, and remote care needs of healthcare facilities with cloud, security, and mobility solutions and accessories that streamline workflow and bring data closer to the patient and clinician.

Learn more about Lenovo Health at Solutions.Lenovo.com/Health

   

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