Prof. Radu George Ciorap,
Grigore T. Popa University of Medicine
and Pharmacy Iași Head of R&D Center
for Medical Devices – Medical
Bioengineering Faculty
Now that the healthcare industry is entering another phase of digital transformation, a combination of AI, digital twins, and hybrid healthcare concepts will lead to innovative solutions for ensuring patient safety and improving its monitoring and management in this sector. As engineering becomes tightly coupled with medicine, new approaches to designing patient-centric services emerge.
The rise of hybrid healthcare refers to a new approach to delivering medical care. Patients can benefit from such a concept because it allows continuous interaction with their doctors and other professionals, as well as interaction with intelligent machines. Properly designed, hybrid healthcare can ensure better access to healthcare, reduced waiting times, early detection of any complications, and increased continuity.
Digital twins are becoming an indispensable part of many innovations within the field. In general, digital twins in healthcare implies the creation of a virtual, dynamic replica of a person, organ, medical devices, clinical processes, or the healthcare ecosystem itself. Such a model can be developed using biomedical and imaging data, information from sensors, electronic medical records, and various types of computational models that can simulate different clinical situations.
One cannot underestimate the importance of AI to these solutions because this technology is responsible for the analysis of large amounts of medical and engineering data. Thus, AI can reveal some patterns, trends, and risks hidden within big data sets and help make certain predictions. The application of AI within the framework of digital twins can allow early identification of risks, improvement of diagnosis and treatment planning, etc. These innovations can have numerous applications within the healthcare field.
Nevertheless, engineering plays a crucial role in all these developments. Biomedical engineers, software developers, clinicians, data scientists, medical device experts, and others should collaborate to develop innovations that would be clinically valid, technically advanced, and patient- safe. Engineering for healthcare involves rigorous testing, development, design, validation, security, and other issues related to ensuring safety.
Moreover, digital twins can also be used in healthcare in terms of training and simulations that are very important for preparing professionals and conducting experiments with devices and other equipment without the actual risk to patients. In other words, simulating medical events and clinical situations with digital twins can be considered as a great preventive measure.
However, there are also some responsibilities and risks associated with the use of AI, digital twins, and other technologies in the area of medicine. Engineers should pay special attention to data quality, bias, explainability, accountability, security, transparency, and privacy when working on innovative technologies. Moreover, it is very important to ensure the accuracy of predictions and make sure they are clinically applicable.
Thus, the future of patient safety depends on how successfully healthcare institutions are able to integrate these innovations into their workflows and preserve the elements of professionalism, empathy, and trust. Hybrid healthcare should not become distant healthcare but should ensure even better monitoring of patients and collaboration with professionals in the era of innovative technologies. Bioengineers are expected to ensure better and safer healthcare in the age of intelligent technologies, this means the use of hybrid healthcare, digital twins, and AI in medicine.
It is necessary to understand that with the emergence of new technologies, there will be no question about whether digitalization can impact the sphere of medicine or not because the only issue will be how these innovations will be introduced. In particular, bioengineers need to make sure that the main focus will be on patient safety.
